December 13th, 2004

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Boring Site Question: Email Updates?

A quick question for you, dear reader. Would you be interested in receiving notifications of site updates by email? I recently read about Bloglet, which enables readers to sign up and receive notifications of site updates.

As a regular reader (or skimmer, at least) of a couple hundred weblogs, this certainly isn’t something I’d want. Additionally, my site is updated frequently, so it’s not like readers don’t know when to expect new material. Still, I thought I’d ask, given the pending redesign. Any interest?

Comments: 8 Responses so far

richard
December 14th, 2004
12:22 am

I’m of the RSS Snob variety… if it’s not syndicated, I’m not likely to read it. However, I think the syndication addicts are still out-numbered by thte mailing list and bookmark types… I’d say that it doesn’t hurt you to add the functionality, and if it helps anyone read your stuff, that’s great.

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Roland Tanglao
December 14th, 2004
1:49 am

your mileage may vary but bloglet is not a reliable service, i have been using it for years on VanEats and have never offered it to my readers because it never works more than 2 weeks in a row without having some sort of service interruption

no disrespect to monsur hossain intended but you get what you pay for, i bet if bloglet actually got some funding (it’s donationware) then it would be a lot more reliable

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udge
December 14th, 2004
2:50 am

I would not sign up for the email notification. Three reasons:

1) RSS.

2) I already get enough e-mail.

3) I look by every day.

This is IMHO only of interest for sites that update seldom or irregularly, and DB is neither of those.

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Richard
December 14th, 2004
3:28 am

I don’t get enough email (aww), but I wouldn’t want email subscriptions. That said, the installed base for email is, well, huge, and the installed base for RSS is rather small, still. That has partly to do with the whole having to download another program to use it thing (not necessarily true, since Thunderbird has RSS capability, as does Outlook with a plugin).

I kind of like the model Drupal has with the subscriptions model. Yeah, yeah, Drupal schmupal, but subscriptions allow you to get updates for comments to a post via email, which is kinda neat, though it needs to be combined with another module for more functionality. I think I would subscribe to RSS feeds of your comments, and not just RSS feeds of *all* comments (though that would be worthwhile), but RSS feeds of the comments from an individual post. I do it for one of my blogs, kind of on the sly, because comments aren’t enabled there, but if you drop me a line I could probably dig up the template for you and help out with the configuration. The discussions in your comments are generally high-quality, and would definitely love to follow individual threads to their conclusion.

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Jeff
December 14th, 2004
9:14 am

Check the page almost every day. No need.

And with the frequency of updates, email alerts would get tedious.

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donna
December 14th, 2004
12:56 pm

none whatsoever. I currently use blogrolling, as most of the sites I read ping weblogs.com or whatever so any newly-updated site is in bold on my list of sites to read. :)

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Rob
December 14th, 2004
4:06 pm

Yeah, I wouldn’t use it either. You already update so often, it’s almost guaranteed that when I come here there will be new material…

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Justin
December 15th, 2004
1:05 am

I don’t know anyone who uses email updates; either people check often (however often is defined), or they are tech savy and use RSS.

My guess is that most readers of your site are using bookmarks or RSS to keep up; however, I would wonder if there are *some* who would like it. I’d imagine the email would be a digest of headlines, from the day or week. Possibly, the best way to gauge interest is to offer it for a X-month period and see how many sign up.

Since I started using Thunderbird RSS a month ago I’ve become addicted to feeds; there’s no turning back.

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