For some of you (right now about 385), getting Jazz@Rochester via email is just how you roll. From some of the comments I get out and about in Rochester, there are some of you who perhaps have signed up and never really visited the website itself. I encourage you to do so as there is much more than the posts on Jazz@Rochester.

Nonetheless, I respect your preference for email and thus try to offer email as one of the ways you can connect to Jazz@Rochester by feeding out posts to the blog to email subscribers over Feedburner, which since I began using them was bought by Google.  While Feedburner has been a pretty good service over the years, there have been too many glitches and they are clearly not really supporting its improvement. In addition, it gave me very little tools to learn how my email subscribers are interacting with the site and how I might serve them better. To that end, I'm switching to using MailChimp for email subscriptions (and thus my friend Freddie to the left). I will temporarily stop the Feedburner email service until I'm sure this is working. 

So, starting with this post, I hope all of my current subscribers will be receiving the post in their inbox via MailChimp. It will look much more like the post on the blog itself and there is much more in the way of options available to my subscribers. Some may not and I encourage them to click on the link in the top of the middle column of the blog and re-subscribe. 

Now, I could use your help to give me a better idea of who my subscribers are and how they interact with the email and the blog. The email subscription form I created for the new service asks for first and last names and requests that you identify yourself as a ROC Jazz Listener, a ROC Jazz Musician, a Venue, or someone from Outside of ROC. The prior service didn't support that kind of interaction, but MailChimp does. At the bottom of this email (I hope) will be a link to a form to update your preferences. I'm hoping that when you select that, you'll be able to fill in your name (if you wish) and select one of the options in the "Who Are You?" field. I am not requiring it, but it would really help me out.  You can also unsubscribe from a link at the bottom of the email. If that's your wish, I'll be sad to see you go, but feel free.

Let me know what you think about the new look in the comments to this post.