Get Your Blogs in E-mail

I'll read blogs online only if I'm forced into it. My preference is to have the blog delivered to me and see it first as e-mail. That way I can choose to read it now or later or not at all.

When it lands in my inbox, or blog folder, in my case, I have better control over my reading time. And just as important, I get to see it, because I don't know about you, but I sometimes forget to go to my favorite bloggers.

Yes, I know, I'm an oddity. (Don't rub it in.) Most people seem to use one of thousands of RSS readers. I don't need yet another program sitting in my system tray.

Inbox RSS delivery
For a long time (at least in Internet years), I used Squeet.com. The site let me configure all my RSS feeds for delivery by e-mail. One day Squeet stopped working. "Squeet will be unavailable while it is undergoing an extended maintenance period.", they said. Very extended.

Hamid Shojaee, the CEO of Axosoft, the brains behind Squeet, had a candid reply to my complaints.

"… after pushing it for nearly 8 months, we had VERY LITTLE interest in the product. Only 10,000 users (non-paying, of course) and the servers used for it were starting to choke because of the sheer volume. (Squeet checked over 50,000 feeds per day, most of them multiple times.) On top of that, Outlook 2007 and nearly every other email client also has RSS capabilities built-in. So we had a hard decision to make -– keep investing in a system that seems to be a dead-end or refocus our efforts on other stuff."

As I said -- very extended.

Hey, Try Yahoo Alerts
I moved all my RSS feeds to Yahoo Alerts and it was terrific. For a while. Then it stopped. Was it something I did -- or, more likely, a Yahoo problem? Who cares -- all I know was that I wasn't getting my blogs.

(Yahoo Alerts and Yahoo Alerts Help)

Forwards from RSSFWD
I'm on a new service -- RssFwd. It does what Squeet and Yahoo Alerts did. The big difference is that it still works. And it's easy enough to use. Copy and paste the blog's URL (try http://blogs.pcworld.com/tipsandtweaks/) into the Submit field. RssFwd finds the XML content feed without your having to lift a finger.

Now help me with my RSS feed bias and tell me, with as many details as you want, how you like to read blogs.

Comments

Hi Steve.

I've been an email subscriber for years and enjoy reading your articles. You seem to have forgotten two of the major players for to RSS to email.

What about Feedburner's email service or FeedBlitz? With these you can also keep track of your subscribers and more.

Cheers!

...Blog Bloke
http://www.instabloke.com

blogbloke

July 21, 2007

4:06 PM PT

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