On our old blogging software, we had an option through which each post could be sent to a particular e-mail address; we then hooked that up with an e-mail distribution service, and allowed readers to subscribe to Conspiracy posts by e-mail. Several hundred users in fact did that.
I’m re trying to do the same with the new software, but as best I can tell WordPress doesn’t have such a feature (is that right?). People have suggested that I use FeedBlitz or Google’s FeedBurner to generate e-mail based on our RSS feed. But this has two problems: First, it only seems to provide for daily digests, not individual posts (which could be good for some people, but I’d like to give readers the option of what to do). And, second, and more important, neither service seems to include the name of each post’s author together with the post. Can anyone recommend some way of avoiding these problems, and especially the second one? Many thanks!
EH says:
WordPress doesn’t do it natively, but these two plugins look to be up to the job:
http://subscribe2.wordpress.com/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-notification/
Only subscribe2 has a digest function, which requires the installation of the wp-cron plugin to fire off the digests once a day:
http://www.skippy.net/blog/category/wordpress/plugins/wp-cron/
They’re both donationware, but Subscribe2 charges $40 for the version that can send HTML email.
November 24, 2009, 5:22 amShelbyC says:
You also used to be available via Kindle, but that feature doesn’t seem to have worked since the move.
November 24, 2009, 9:47 amEugene Volokh says:
ShelbyC: We’re about to get the Kindle feature back up — we’ve done what we need on our end, and it should be on the pipeline at the NewsTex/Kindle end.
November 24, 2009, 10:14 amlucia says:
There is a plugin called mailpress. I tried it but I’m afraid it may be badly written and suck huge amounts of CPU. (I’m pretty sure it loads a large class to deal with mailing everytime the blog displays, an that’s unnecessary to it’s operation.)
It’s possible to run your own listserve using some free softward (phpmail? I have to refresh my memory). You can then the feeds you prefer. I spent a bit of time figuring it out a the week before last and I was planning to do that last week at my climate blog, but I’m afraid climate blogging got sort of… ‘exciting’ and I deferred it.
There are some advantages to your own listserve, but the disadvantage is you have to do it.
November 24, 2009, 11:34 amShelbyC says:
Cool. Thanks. :-)
November 24, 2009, 11:37 amDTS says:
All data in the WordPress “Excerpt” field can be transmitted to Feedburner’s summary for delivery by email or RSS. Raw HTML code can be pasted into “Excerpts” as well. This allows a lot of flexibility for each author to decide what goes through including their own identity.
November 24, 2009, 2:00 pmSteve says:
Eugene,
I think you asked this question before. My suggestion would be to avoid WordPress plugins that send out an e-mail to subscribers every time a post is released. We now have hundreds subscribed to our Feedburner feed sending out an e-mail one time per day (we choose the time).
I’d be concerned with server load if I had a set up that sent out almost 1,000 e-mails every time I posted when we can easily have seven or more posts in a day. That is why we have RSS feeds and Google Reader (as an example).
You’ll also want to check with your hosting. If you are on a dedicated server or a VPS, you should have no issues sending out all of that mail, but I’m on a Rackspace Cloud Sites configuration and they do limit us to about 250 e-mails every 30 minutes or so I think, and such delivery through the WordPress PHP mail configuration would be SLOW.
November 24, 2009, 2:09 pmJosh Blackman says:
Professor Volokh, would you consider a Twitter feed? With http://www.twitterfeed.com, you can link Twitter to your RSS Feed. Whenever you post a new article, it will Tweet!
November 24, 2009, 2:33 pmSteve says:
We do this too. I think we also have posts pushing to a Facebook page.
November 24, 2009, 2:37 pmEric says:
Would you consider different RSS feeds based upon the author of the post? I would like to follow a few conspirators in particular.
November 24, 2009, 2:39 pm2 cents says:
I am not sure how much help this is because I don’t remember exactly how I did it. But, I am getting an RSS feed now in my Outlook that has individual posts with the authors. As far as I know, you already have this capability enabled. I think I just clicked the subscribe button in the right column and my Outlook picked this up.
November 24, 2009, 7:50 pmTC says:
Google Reader works fine for individual posts.
November 25, 2009, 9:57 amDon Miller says:
I have been using RSS Popper plugin for Outlook 2003 and the built in RSS feeds in Outlook 2007 and now in Outlook 2010 beta
Works great for me. Most modern email readers also allow RSS subscription. That makes the feeds just like emails for me.
RSS Popper used to bring me all the current comments too. The built in RSS in Outlook 2007 and 2010 makes me click a link to see the comments online.
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December 2, 2009, 7:08 pmTimothy Knox says:
Personally, I read The Volokh Conspiracy (and all the other blogs I follow (about a thousand)) using a wonderful piece of software called rss2email. It works great. It took me about ten minutes to install it and get it running properly. Good luck!
December 2, 2009, 11:09 pmvirus lab 2009 says:
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December 19, 2009, 4:55 pm