A report on the subscription count here.
This morning, I took a peek at the Feedburner e-mail subscription count for this site. This service, which works with my RSS feed, automatically generates a daily e-mail message that summarizes the articles posted to the site in the previous day. If there were no articles in a day, there’s no e-mail. If there were 1 or more articles in a day, 1 e-mail message is generated and sent. The message includes links to the full article content. So a subscriber can skim through a new content message, decide he wants to read an article, click the link to the article, and jump right to the article’s page. Easy and an effective way to keep track of what’s new without having to manually browse the site each day.
The service, which is full automated, works with the E-Mail Notification form that appears on the site’s Home page. A person who wants to subscribe enters his e-mail address and clicks Subscribe. A window opens with a form that prompts him to enter characters in a box. When he clicks Complete Subscription Request, Feedburner generates a confirmation e-mail message and sends it to his e-mail address. That prevents people from subscribing others to this service when they might not want it. He must click the link in that message when he receives it (normally within about a minute) to start the subscription. If he doesn’t click the link, the subscription does not start.
Although this site gets a lot of visitors and many of them are repeat visitors, it only has 12 e-mail subscribers. I think it’s because people are worried that they’ll get a lot of junk mail.
But here’s the truth: subscribers only get the messages as described here. There’s no junk. I know this because I’m a subscriber — I signed on to monitor how this feature works and make sure it doesn’t spam my subscribers. I’m very pleased with the results and highly recommend it to anyone interested in keeping track of content. It’s especially good for people who don’t subscribe to or monitor RSS feeds, which offer another way to keep track of what’s going on here without manually visiting. (I don’t follow RSS feeds because they’re simply not a part of my normal daily routine. E-mail, however, is.)
Anyway, if you’re a regular visitor, I urge you to give this feature a try. I think you’ll like it. And if you don’t, that’s okay. You can always unsubscribe.
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Maria,
I use Bloglines as my RSS reader and I find that is the way I like to read posts. That way, they are all in one place and I don’t lose stuff. If I subscribed using e-mail, I would never read it as it would disappear into the background.
Nice content on your blog. I bought your book on WordPress by the way. I like it a lot although the changes to the default template confused me until I realized the book was out of sync with the new design. No matter, I figured it out in the end myself and I still find the book valuable.
Thanks!
Michael
I have tried using RSS readers and failed miserably. Again, it’s because I don’t check feeds as part of my routine. The reader I tried (and paid for) is Endo, which I like quite a bit. But there’s so much new content out there that if I don’t check daily, I’m overrun with new content when I do check. And frankly, I have more than enough to do with my time.
I know I’m missing out on some good content that could help me with my computer work. I think one of my new year’s resolutions will be to try to make checking feeds part of my daily routine. It’ll probably be a lot easier than my usual resolution: to lose weight.
Oh, and about the book — it’s very upsetting to see instructions go wrong just because of a software update. Miraz and I do try to post some updates to the book’s content at the book’s companion Web site, http://www.wpvqs.com/. But it’s an uphill battle, especially when neither of us regularly use the default template and don’t spot the changes. We rely on readers to point out where the book doesn’t match the software, then try to post updates as required. Check that site for updates and let us know there what’s not correct due to software changes.
Thanks for writing!