Subscribing to Updates

You may have noticed that in the sidebar along the right of the page I've added a "Subscribe" section. We've received a few "Why don't you send out emails when you update the blog?" questions from people, to which I have two responses:

1. Since we started the blog 10 months ago I've averaged more than a post every other day. I know I often add new posts in bunches, but even allowing for that there's still something new just about every week. I feel like if I was sending out emails that often it would be bordering on spam. That leads me to my second point...
2. The whole point of writing a blog was to avoid having to repeatedly send out broadcast emails with pictures and updates on Evan's exploits! (I would have put that all in bold text but it seemed a little too obnoxious... but when I read it in my head it's still loud.)
   
3. Did I say two responses? I meant three. One of the nice things about Blogger is that it automatically produces an RSS feed for your blog so people can easily subscribe to receive updates.
   

Given the last point, I assume the reason people ask about updates is that they don't know about RSS or don't get it. That's fair enough, so let me give you the one-line tutorial. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a technology that is used to publish frequently updated content on the web (such as this blog) where you use a program called a "feed reader" or an "aggregator" to consume that content (i.e. read the updates). That one sentence really should have been two but I had already emotionally committed to the "one-line tutorial" idea.

Anyway, the feed reader can either be an application you run on your computer (which often looks similar to email software like Outlook or Eudora) or a web-based application that runs in your browser (like a webmail client like Hotmail or Gmail). I personally use Google Reader, which is a web-based feed reader. Whatever kind of application you use, there has always been a link at the very bottom of the blog (it says "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)") that you plug in to the reader and updates to the blog automagically appear. You can subscribe to feeds for lots of different web sites and then you just go to your reader to see what's new on the sites you're interested in. For example, I subscribe to my own blog (so I know that it's working), and Steph's parent's blog, and her sister Kim's about her trip to Europe, and my friend's about their twins, and a few of my favorite writers on ESPN.com, and a writer for the Baltimore Sun who covers the Terrapins, and the blog from the Google Maps team, and... you get the picture.

So I think RSS and feed readers are great for anyone who regularly browses the same sites on the web (which I bet is just about everyone who reads this blog), but maybe you don't. And maybe you'd still like a way to subscribe to blog updates, presumably through email. Well, I finally found a way to help you too. I found a web site called RssFwd that does exactly what you want - it takes the URL for an RSS feed and your email address and then emails you the updates. Violà! There are three caveats, though:

1. You have to give it an actual email address, not an alias. For instance, the email address I normally use is actually an alias to my Gmail account, so I had to use my Gmail address, not the alias. I imagine this is not an issue for the vast majority of people, but I wanted to mention it anyway.
2. You'll probably have to add the address the emails come from, "rssfwd@rssfwd.com", to the "Not Spam" list in your email client (I know both Gmail and Yahoo! Mail tagged the incoming messages as junk mail at first).
3. The web site claims up and down that they won't sell your email address to anyone and you won't receive any email from them other than the desired RSS updates. The issue is that the company that provides the web site, Blue Sky Factory, is an email marketing company -- they're spammers. So technically they could keep the first half of their promise and not sell your address to anyone and still cause a problem since they are the kind of people you'd be worried a web site would sell your address to in the first place. Now, they do state quite clearly that they won't spam you, and I've been subscribed to updates through this service (I don't really need them since I use a reader, but I had to make sure it worked first) for almost two weeks now and haven't received a single spurious email that looked like it was their fault, but I wanted to make you aware of the potential issue.
   

So, if you want to subscribe to updates to this blog you can go to the Subscribe section on the right and either enter your email address in the "Through email" box (and click the "Subscribe" button next to it) or just click Subscribe next to "Through RSS feed" to use a reader (after you install and/or setup your reader application, of course). Or you can just periodically check the blog when the mood strikes you like you've been doing for the last 10 months.

Enjoy!