drag and drop to compose
Hi all,
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I originally posted this question on Stack Overflow...users suggested I post it here. Here is the situation: I run a listserv where I post many job advertisements for my students. I regularly post many advertisements in ~20 different categories of job type. Currently, I simply find the advertisements, and then copy/paste the header and links into a word document for that category. I then highlight all, copy/paste into an email for that category, and send to students. This creates an organizational nightmare for me...since it means that I have ~20 different windows open. Also...all of the window-switching is a real pain-in-the-rear.
I think I figured out a partial solution, but I need some help. I can create a ~20 WordPress blogs...one for each job category. WordPress allows a user to post to a blog via email through a unique email link provided for each blog. In this way, my students will not receive emails. Instead, they will go to a blog to see their advertisements. My problem with this option is that it requires me to copy/paste text into a new email, enter in the correct email address, and then send. This many keystrokes for 100+ advertisements a day will take awhile (even if I use all keyboard shortcuts). It would be really nice if I could create ~20 buttons or icons that I can drag and drop highlight text to, and Firefox would run a macro to copy/paste the text into an email with a preset email address for that job category.
Anything that could help?
All Replies (1)
Hi Aaron, there are a lot of parts to this project.
Let's start with sending an email. Firefox cannot send an email message just using what is built-in to the browser. It can send a URL to your webmail site to compose a new message (example: mailto:bob@example.com?subject=Opportunity&body=Knocking), but this is complicated with multi-line messages and you'll need to review/finalize/send each message, so that probably isn't going to work for you.
It would be easier for a web server to send the message because most include back-end software for that. In theory you could create a web app with the necessary buttons and code to generate and send the emails, but I don't know whether you can find that already built and available for a reasonable price.
If you can find such a tool, it's probably better to continue with the listserv than start up with WordPress. In my own experience, I could not predict how formatting sent by email would appear on my blog and defaulted those new posts to DRAFT status so I could finalize them properly. So that is more work on the back end.