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:
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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!"
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You see the subscribe field, enter your email and press enter.
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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).