I’ve been very pleased by the conversion to WordPress so far (more on that later), but one feature that isn’t yet working as well as I’d like is blog post delivery by e-mail. People can subscribe via FeedBlitz, but I couldn’t figure out how to set that up to (1) provide an option to deliver each post as it’s posted (rather than having the daily digests be the only option), and (2) indicate the author’s name for each post.
Could anyone suggest an alternative service I can use, whether based on our RSS feed or otherwise? I don’t even need something that has built-in subscriber list management; I can arrange that myself. It would suffice if every post could automatically get e-mailed to some address, including the author’s name in the subject line. I’d love to hear input on this. Many thanks!
Ben P says:
I personally use Wizz RSS Reader as a Firefox addon to keep track of all the RSS feeds I look at.
I’ve known some people to use Feed my Inbox but that’s a subscriber side service rather than a provider side service.
October 5, 2009, 2:45 pmMatthew says:
Only somewhat related – if there is a way to have RSS feed by author, that feature would be very much appreciated. I know the old platform has “select a blogger” but it didn’t support RSS. Thanks!
October 5, 2009, 3:38 pmJ. Aldridge says:
Feedburner.com is an alternative. I think I have seen a plugin for wordpress that will allow subscription and email of new posts, too.
Also, title headings should not be justified! Tell Sekimori.
October 5, 2009, 3:54 pmTom says:
I use rss2email to send RSS feeds to my email program. Posts come through with a sender, subject, and (some of) the article body.
October 5, 2009, 4:06 pmSteve says:
We’re using Google Feedburner to distribute our feed on a daily basis. We can pick what time the feed goes out, but we can not do it every time a post goes out. These free services are limited. If we have 1,500 subscribers, and we post seven or eight items in a day, that means the service would need to send out more than 12,000 e-mails in a day – hence the once a day delivery.
My guess is that you could burn and send out the feed yourself (not familiar how to do that) but unless you have a dedicated server or a pretty powerful virtual private server, your host may not like the fact you are sending out thousands of e-mails each day. (Hence I let Feedburner collect the feed via RSS and distribute for us.)
My feed right now (in my RSS reader and my daily e-mail) is missing the author name. Your feed does include the author name, so when delivered via e-mail I think it should be viewable.
October 5, 2009, 4:07 pmGordo says:
One complaint about your WordPress format:
In your old format, if the conspirator was not accepting comments, there would be nothing shown after the blog post – so it was easy to tell that comments were not enabled.
In your new format, I just pressed the “comments” section on Professor Lindgren’s last post, which said “0 comments,” and found that there were “0 comments” because comments were not enabled.
A very slight waste of time, and a minor irritation. But hopefully something you can fix.
October 5, 2009, 4:41 pmmrshl says:
I too use Feedburner (now owned by Google). It also offers the admittedly annoying possibility of adding adsense advertisements to the footer of your feeds.
October 5, 2009, 4:45 pmJohn says:
Feedburner.com FTW
October 5, 2009, 4:49 pmLe Messurier says:
Not on the delivery by e-mail, but concerning Word Press: It is certainly easier to read, and the commenting feature is better, but can you PLEASE shut off the automatic pop-up feature of the share/save button. The pop-up is very annoying; adds nothing, and interrupts concentration when scanning/reading posts. It is NOT a feature and is not cool. A simple click to bring up the save/share menu is sufficient. The save/share feature is on many blogs and every one that has the pop-up feature is very irritating.
October 5, 2009, 5:18 pmLe Messurier says:
My previous not very well written (A feature is a feature is a feature… or not) but I’m sue you get my drift.
October 5, 2009, 5:25 pmRicardo says:
Slightly off-topic, but I noticed the feature we used to have of excluding certain bloggers was broken with the switch to the new blogging platform. Adding ?exclude=xxxx no longer works. Is there any chance of reviving this feature which, for me anyway, makes the blog more readable?
October 5, 2009, 6:12 pmneurodoc says:
How about soliciting suggested modifications? For example, mine would include:
- I see “1″ before every comment, which serves no purpose. Why not serially number the comments for ease of reference?
- It used to be that some commenters would allow their email addresses to be viewed, making it possible to correspond directly with those individual. It seems that now it is only possible to see the website addresses for those who themselves blog. Can something be done so that those who want to can share their email addresses?
- It was visually somewhat cleaner when comments were individually “boxed”? Any plans to make further stylistic changes?
I do like the “quote” feature and the email “subscription” possibility.
October 5, 2009, 7:38 pm24AheadDotCom says:
Has this site considered switching to a real CMS, like Drupal? It’s not difficult to write a module that will take various actions when something is posted, and for certain actions/responses no programming might be needed.
October 5, 2009, 9:08 pmgreg says:
Why would they do that? The site is nothing more than a blog and WordPress has a wide range of addons available that allow posting functionality to be altered, and creating a custom addon for WP is no more difficult than a custom module for Drupal. Much easier, actually.
October 6, 2009, 8:00 amSarah says:
Drupal is such overkill for nearly every use I’ve seen it put to. Gah, stick with WP even if it means uglier, less readable, non-emailed-to-me posts.
You might be able to send each post as an email to a Google Group (set up something to send each post to just one email address, and have that address be the posting address for the Google Group.) I’m reasonably confident they don’t have a maximum number of subscribers.
October 6, 2009, 6:55 pm