How can I be alerted of new entries to this blog?
There are a couple ways, but I think the best option is to use a feed reader. The feed reader I use and like a lot is called "Feedreader strangely enough. I’ve included a link to the reader at the bottom of this post. I really like this reader because it is fairly unobtrusive and yet give notification of new posts to the blog that are subscribed to. Here is a screen shot of the amount of real estate it normally takes up. See the little cube like things. That’s it. Click that and you get the reader interface.
Outlook 2007 also has an RSS reader built in. There is a link below about Outlook 2007 and RSS. For Outlook 2003 you need to add a third party tool. I tried IntraVnews once long ago and didn’t like it. It also wasn’t free as I recall. There is also a free one that I haven’t tried called Attensa for Outlook.
Once you have installed Feedreader you can add this blog by clicking the All Entries link in the sidebar. This will give you notification each time there is a new main post, think topic. Clicking the link should automagically bring up feedreader with the feed ready to be added.
There are four distinct types of feeds you can subscribe to from this blog:
- The feed of all new posts. (This is a post.)
- You can also add a feed for all comments in the entire blog. This may be overkill but is the closest to using email with reply all.
- You can also get a feed each category. You will then only get notifications for post in that category.
- The last feed you can subscribe to is the feed for the comments to a single post. So if you see a post that you need to follow (like one you wrote), you can subscribe to the comment feed. The link for that is on the single post view where you see the comment form. (Click the title of this post to see the view for this post.)
There are other ways to read RSS feeds like using iGoogle and My Yahoo.
WordPress, which is the software being used for this blog, also has a plugin for getting emails, but I haven’t installed that right at the moment.
References
Tags: attensa, blog, feedreader, reader
