Musings about Entrepreneurship, Technology and Software Development

Accidental Technologist

Subscribe to Posts Via Email

It seems more and more web sites are offering users to subscribe to updates delivered by email.  If you would rather have posts delivered right to your inbox instead of visiting the site or relying on RSS, you can now subscribe and forget.

Just add your email to the “Subscribe to Blog via Email”, submit and confirm your desire to subscribe in the confirmation email and thats it.  You can unsubscribe any time.

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  • Matt Lamoureux

    I see this as an interesting trend. “Back in the day”, I got most of my news from newsletters sent to my inbox. Then I discovered RSS and immediately switched over everything I could, since RSS let me receive news from sources without giving them my email address. Then things like Facebook and Twitter changed things again by having news items show up in my feeds along with shared items from friends and family. The lack of organizational features and list view never felt right to me though – I have dozens of feeds and tend to scan headlines, or not read certain feeds for days at a time. Social networks don’t seem to allow for that behavior. Now we have phone apps, where every company has them and wants you to install them. I like those even less, as the permissions they require are often far more than they would realistically need to provide those features.

    Unfortunately for me, it feels like social media is trying to kill off RSS – at least Google thinks so or they wouldn’t have killed their excellent Reader. So while I still get the majority of my news via other RSS service providers for now, I am still looking for an alternative – one of them lately being email newsletters. Giving out my email address seems less of a security risk these days – at least compared to installing apps – and I am still able to keep my methodology of scanning headlines or just not reading something right away. I don’t see myself switching completely to newsletters again, but it is tempting…

  • Oh man..I agree. RSS is being killed off daily and I also think Google is trying to make that happen. My subscriber count dropped way off after they killed Reader and I heard the same story from many blog writers.

    The reason I even enabled email subscriptions is because some people I’ve talked with said they don’t use RSS at all any longer and will only consume content from blogs via email. It seems like a step back but I admit that I subscribe to so many newsletters today than I used to and less blogs. Not because I’ve taken a stand or anything, but rather because some writers aren’t even posting via RSS but ONLY in newsletter format.

    I figure if people subscribe to email content and some still use RSS then that’s just another channel to push content.

    I use Feedwrangler as my Google Reader replacement. It works really well and keeps my feeds in sync since I use my Mac, iPhone and iPad and even my Nexus 7 to consume RSS feeds.