How to use a little AJAX magic to hide the York lists service and give your site visitors a much slicker experience when they subscribe to your mailing list.

We’ve looked after our own mailing list for years. We had a nice database of users hosted on the website that was pretty flexible, easy for us to use and very easy to which to sign up.

But sending out mail is another matter entirely. We currently have around 700 addresses on our list, and it has become increasingly difficult to find a server that is prepared to send out that many messages. We had to resort to splitting mailouts, VPNing to York and dodging angry system administrators in order to get our mail out. And culling the dead emails from the list wasn’t much fun either.

So we’ve finally given up and got a York Lists account. In many ways it’s great: emailing the list is now as easy as, um, sending an email, and it deletes invalid addresses automatically.

A nice personality

But it’s a bit of an ugly thing. We used to have this signup form. The lists service gave us this one instead. It doesn’t match the rest of the site and provides far too much useless information on screen.

It would be nice to use the old signup form with our new lists account. And luckily we can.

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As part of their website redesign, YUSU have added Google Apps support to give each club and society a nice big Gmail account. Like a lot of societies, after some deliberation we decided to make the move from our old York socs account.

Things have been largely positive, but there are a few gotchas we’ve come up against so far. I’m going to provide a quick setup guide and then outline these issues so you hopefully don’t have to follow the same (occasionally torturous) path we did.
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