FeedBurner Does Email Delivery…..freaking awesome!
Yesterday I was bouncing around the inter-tubes, looking for a nice plugin for WordPress that would allow me to offer email subscriptions of my content. WordPress.org is always the first place to look and that’s where I went. I found a couple of options, but never found anything that looked like a simple, turn key, solution. They all seemed halfway there and potentially buggy and unsupported. I almost gave up on the idea.
I’m not sure what made me think of it, but I started thinking about FeedBurner and how easy it is to setup and distribute my feeds. I went to the Feedburner site and TADA! I found exactly what I wanted. Not only does FeedBurner offer a sweet Feed distribution service, but they also have everything you need to offer email subscriptions. I enabled the feature in my Kamen Lee Dot Com account and copied the code that they offerd to slap on the front page of my site. DONE!
I was very curious to find out how it handled the posts and how the email thing would work out. I checked my email this morning and to my delight there was an email from Kamen Lee Dot Com in my inbox and the email contained both posts from yesterday. They were formatted exactly how I have them formatted on my site and all of the header graphics came through perfectly.
They also have footer messages providing a link for people to unsubscribe. They even provide a snail mailing address for those that want to cancel their subscription in writing. It’s not often high tech companies offer low tech solutions for things like this…for free. I am not saying that I hope people utilize the Unsubscribe options, but it’s nice to know that they are there.
-Kamen
I agree. It’s a great solution. The one thing I would like to do is set up a tease email. In other words, only include the headline, image, and maybe two lines as a teaser with a read more link. That way, the reader is encouraged to click over to my website.