Email Subscription Service For This Blog

Email Subscription Service For This Blog by Brian Kelly | Feb 19, 2007 | Blog , RSS | 5 comments Roddy MacLeod recently pointed out the difficulties end users may have in understanding how to add RSS feeds to RSS viewers. I think Roddy is right – and we do need to make interfaces much easier to use, especially for users who make use of email and Web browsers, but don’t understand RSS readers. In response to this I recently subscribed to three services which deliver RSS feeds using email. The services were R-Mail , RSSfwd and Feedblitz . At the delivery end, the services seem similar: with all of them I received a HTML-formatted email, with embedded images. The Feedblitz subscription service seems to be the most sophisticated, allowing the delivery to be suspended (perhaps when going away on holiday) together with a host of other options which can be accessed from the dashboard, as illustrated. However as the aim of this service is to provide an interface which is very easy to use, especially for the inexperienced user, I have chosen the R-Mail service, and provided an interface to this at at the top of the right-hand sidebar widget. 5 Comments Karen Blakeman on February 20, 2007 at 11:30 am Interesting feedback on these tools. As an RSS junkie it goes against the grain for me to advocate the use of these or to acknowledge that they even exist. But I agree that they will enable users who are uncertain about the newer technologies to access content, and perhaps eventually encourage them to explore RSS. Karen

P.S. A few readers have asked which backup & site migration we actually reach for — it's BlogVault; take a look here if you want the current details.