I have been thinking about how I can improve my blog subscription accessibility. A lot of people like to subscribe to blog RSS feeds these days. And unfortunately, that was not a feature that I made available. I personally only subscribe to one RSS feed at the moment and that is only because that blogger doesn’t give me any other way of following their posts. My preferred method for subscribing to blogs is to receive email notifications when a new blog is created by a blogger and that was the only method that I offered on my site for a very long time.
In fact, most of the email subscription part of my blog that was offered was not even automated. If someone wanted to receive email notifications from me, they would have to use my contact form or let me know in some other way, and then I would manually add their email address to a list. To date, all my subscribers are real world friends of mine, so there have always been other means of communication available beyond my site with these people. But the task of adding your email to my list could easily be an automated procedure and up until now, I had not made it so. No one beyond my real world friends have ever contacted me about subscribing and I believe that having a more automated method will increase the likelihood of non real world friend subscribers. I know that other people read my blog, because they have posted comments on some of my posts. I wanted to make the option of subscribing available to them as well and make sure they are comfortable doing so.
Also, I know that a great many of my friends read my blog posts because I link them on Facebook as Notes. This is an ok method for keeping up to date with my entries, but there is a good chance that you would miss a post that you might have enjoyed because you didn’t login to your Facebook account the day I linked it. To make sure that you never miss a beat in my world of blogging, please feel free to use one of my blog subscription options. Their icons have been made available on all blog pages at the top right and bottom left of the pages.
NEW Features:
- Email Notification Form (the blue envelope icon): A blog email notification form has been created that is meant to be completed by those that want to subscribe to my blog by receiving an email when a post is created or updated. Your email address will be automatically added to the list, but for security I will have to approve the address. It is open for anyone to subscribe, but there are a lot of “bots” out there that just love to submit forms, and I just assume deny them from my list.
- Automated Unsubscribe (for those receiving email notifications already and in the future): You have complete control over the unsubscribe feature. I will not be notified or offended if you choose to stop receiving email notifications from my blog. Each email notification from my blog posts will have an Unsubscribe link at the end. If you feel like my emails are more like SPAM and less like valuable information, then please use your unsubscribe link.
- RSS Feed (the purple signal icon): If email notifications is not the way to go for you, then no problem. I have posted the RSS link on my blog as well, for those that prefer to follow using that method.
And finally, to my current subscribers: Thank you for caring so much about what I have to say. I hope that my blog is interesting and entertaining for you!
To my future subscribers: Welcome to my blogging world!
