Regular visitors may have noticed things being a little broken here at intepid lately— I’ve been reworking a bunch of stuff, getting title-free posts happening for one thing, and more significantly I am going to trial email subscriptions, both to individual posts (to track comments) as well as to the blog as a whole. I decided I wanted to try email subscriptions after reading Scott’s recent post.

Although I still need to add some extra code to support comment subscriptions, I think I’m ready to test blog subscriptions now. The main goal is to keep it all as simple as humanly possible, so this is how it will work:

1. You, the casual reader, come across this site and think "hmm… I’d like to keep track of this, but I still don’t know how to use alligators, and my bookmark menu is already three screens high!"
2. You see the subscribe field, enter your email and press enter.
3. That’s it! From then on you will receive each new post (only when first published, not every time I make a minor update) as a tidy HTML formatted email, with an unsubscribe link at the bottom.

Assuming the testing goes okay I’ll be putting a sign-up button in the sidebar, but for now you can try the following:

So is this an appropriate solution for people who don’t use aggregators? At least now I won’t have to badger my friends to try Bloglines etc…

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BTW I’ve tried one 3rd party solution (FeedBlitz) and was a little disappointed with the number of steps required, hence the roll-yer-own approach (+ I am a control freak who enjoys reinventing the wheel).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 1:11 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.