I have added the Subscribe2 plugin to my site as a measure to ensure that anyone who really wants to try and keep up with my fast paced writing will be able to do so. After reading RT Cunningham’s convincing article on Untwisted Vortex, I decided that this was a good idea. See the link to the right? Plop your email address in there and you should get an email notification every time I post something new. If I published more often, I’d provide a digest. But, since its rare for me to post more than once a day, I’ll send every time that something new comes up. AFAIK, this doesn’t work for comments, though.
My original solution was to follow Feedburner’s suggestion of providing email subscriptions their way. I tried desperately to get Feedburner to work with my site, but they just don’t want to wait for my feed. For some reason, I feed my posts in a manner that is just a tad too slow for Feedburner’s impatient timeout and there doesn’t seem to be any trick that works to get Feedburner to accept my post feed. The comments feed shows up in a split second, though. The Feedburner help documentation had suggested that I could use SendMeRSS to send the posts via email and, after creating their widget, I was supposedly in business.
I got to thinking that there must be a way that I can do this myself, rather than rely on yet another external service to do my work for me. I know that the philosophy is to delegate your work, but this is different. This is why I decided to continue feeding through my own link (http://coreythompson.com/feed/ and http://coreythompson.com/comments/feed/). The RSS feed links are still embedded in the sidebar as well. I’ve moved them all to the top so that they’re easier to see quickly.
Consider this post the first test of the new way (I get an email every time, as my email address is in the TO: field and everyone else will be in the BCC:, which means no email marketing lists will be collected by anyone this way). As usual, I will use your email address only for its intended purpose and never give it out.
Yes. I don’t believe in “feedburning”. RSS/Atom is not black magic – just a bit of XML markup and any dynamic website should be able to automate it pretty easily.
I don’t understand why so many bloggers choose the feedburner way of publishing their feeds. It just defies all logic.
I use Feedburner without any problems. I mainly use it for traffic generation because they post your feed to their readers. It makes your feed more available to possible readers who wouldn’t have known you existed, which is the reason for Feedburner.
PS: I like this comment editor better BTW. :p
Since I visit your site manually the old fashioned way everyday I don’t need to subscribe to this service! But I think its neat!
Keep up the good work on the technological front.
Ok, so now I’m subscribed to the email feed again.
I use Scroogle Reader BTW, so no need for be to get e-mail.
So, Feedburner or Suscribe2? And what plugin do you use on the right top of your page. I use both. Feedburner sends very nice newsletters via email daily. Suscribe2 sends unattractive ones. But I had no way of checking how many, total, suscribers I have in the site, with Feedburner. And I don’t understand if the daily number adds up, and those subscribed (7,5,6,3,1, etc.) keep receiving it. Also, I don’t control the list, don’t have their email addresses. Al that I have in Suscribe2, with an unattractive display. Which one is better? Is there a way to improve Suscribe2?
I don’t use Feedburner at all,as I’ve not had good luck with them. Apparently, the feeds are “burning” now, but I will just continue to use the built in feed provision in Wordpress. If you want a more attractive look, you can always visit the site, IMO. I read feeds to get it all fast. If its important to see the detail, I visit the site, but that’s me.
I only use Subscribe2 for the email subscriptions, as feedburner doesn’t like the amount of time my site takes to reply to it. The plugin relies on the built in ability of PHP to send email, so its all controlled from this site, rather than relying on the uptime of another host.
I also intentionally uglify my feeds by not allowing hotlinking of images,to keep my bandwidth down (I could use a LOT more than I do, but it keeps the cost down for my host, which trickles down to me).
I add a description and use the excerpt in the WP Post. That way my entire post isn’t scraped and duplicated by those plagerizing scum bags. So if my readers subscribe to my feed they get a description of the post, and then can visit the site to get the full story. (If they want)
but mostly I want them to
Wow I’m so glad that I read this post.
I am so glad that you did as well! Why not read some of my newer posts! They’re even better!