Use AJAX and PHP to Build your Mailing List
SitePoint.com has published my article entitled Use AJAX and PHP to Build your Mailing List, which walks you through the development of a simple system that allows your visitors to sign up for a mailing list stored in a MySQL database without having to refresh or leave the page. I use Prototype to send an Ajax call to a PHP script to store the address and return a success or failure message to the HTML page. It’s a very simple approach, but you’ll need to know a bit about PHP and JavaScript to grasp the details. A working example of the script is included to help illustrate how it works.
A very useful improvement to this script would be to tie into a mailing list management system via an API, which would allow you to store addresses to a system where you can later send HTML emails to your audience and track views, clicks and other important data. The system I use is Mail Chimp, which has a nice PHP class that makes tying into their API easy.