How to Have Blog RSS Feeds Sent to You by Email
I guess I’m just old school, but in most cases I prefer receiving blog news and updates by email rather than through an RSS newsreader.
Scratch that… it has less to do with being “old school” than it does with the fact that email is still my main direct communications channel. Simply put, I spend a lot of time daily using my email client software. First thing I look at in the morning, and more often than not, the last thing I check before signing off for the day.
I still do use newsreaders (like the Google Reader), but to me, using one is “yet another extra thing to remember to do.” That means a better than even likelihood that I’ll just plain forget to check it as I get busy and focused on other things. Translated, I just miss a lot of blog posts that are fed to a newsreader.
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Not so with blog post feeds that arrive automatically in my email inbox. Granted, the updates aren’t as real time or frequent as a newsreader’s, but I really don’t give a futz about that — if something’s that important to me, I figure out some other way (such as desktop autonotifiers) to get the info as it’s generated. But most blog posts? Not quite so critical.
The usual way of getting a feed emailed to you is to simply subscribe to one through the site itself. A lot of blogs are nice enough to give readers that little extra bit of convenience. The link to subscribe to Wordpreneur’s is at the upper right corner, for instance; just click on it and the 3rd-party service destination — Google’s Feedburner, in this case — will take you through the simple process of getting you subscribed to the feed.
Not all blogs bother to set up email subcriptions, however. But guess what — there’s a good chance that such a blog will still have a publicly-accessible RSS feed.
That’s all you need really. If you have the URL to a blog’s RSS feed, you’re in business.
How I do it: Armed with the blog’s RSS feed URL, I go to FeedBlitz (where anyone can get a free account) and set up the service to send the feed contents to me by email. The only spec detail the service needs to start doing this is — voila! — the URL to the blog’s RSS feed. The emails usually come first thing in the morning, if the blog — and therefore, its RSS feed — has any updates.
The only minus is that I personally don’t think FeedBlitz has got the friendliest of interfaces — it’s got that kludged together feeling — but it sure does work. Don’t let that scare you away; the service is put together well enough to figure out… but if you get lost and have problems, comment below. It shouldn’t be too hard to talk me into doing a steo-by-step post.
If you know of other alternatives out there, do also please comment below and let the rest of us know! — EES
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