Shelly is wondering if anyone out there is familar with a tool other than Bloglet (which we both have found is fine when it works, but it only seems to work most of the time) that will send an RSS feed to an email account. I’m curious too – any help? Beuller?
Link: Bloglet.
UPDATE: As recommended by John in the comments below, I tried out both Blogarithm and Bot a Blog, and both sent me an email to let me know the blog I was monitoring had been updated. Neither included the post, as Bloglet does, but they included a link to the blog, so I could easily go see what had been updated. Not a perfect solution, but still better than no notice at all. I’ll continue to monitor for a few days to see how reliable they appear to be.
It occurs to me that if you weren’t trying to allow folks to sign up on their own, for instance if you just wanted the updates to automatically go to a listserv, you could also use WatchThatPage to do this. You’d just have to set up a separate account with them to send email to your listserv address…
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14 Responses to “RSS to email?”
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/rss2email/
Haven’t tried it though…
Thanks D’Arcy, I know I (always) prefer something a little more simple – something that doesn’t require me to come to someone like you to program it, though I suppose if that only needed to be one time and it worked well and unattended after that’d be the next best thing…
Hi there – I looked at this earlier, but what i’m looking for is a tool to embed in a blog that allows users to subscribe. I might be understanding this wrong (it doesn’t appear to be written in a language i speak 😉 ), but this tool functions more as an aggregator than it does as a disseminator, right? E.g. instead of maintaining a feed database, I want to maintain a database of readers (who are not likely to use an aggregator), and notify them via email when a particular blog is updated. Bloglet does accomplish this (when it works), and I think MT blogs have a built in tool that functions similarly, so it must be possible…. Anyone? (and thanks, Paul, for posting this question, and to D’Arcy for the suggestion!)
These 2 tools are a little different, being that you can’t see an email list.
http://www.botablog.com/index.php
http://www.blogarithm.com/
Yeah, that’s what we’re looking for, thanks John! Now you have to post some more ’cause I’m using your blog to test each of these services 🙂
I’ve set up RSSfwd for my blog.
http://rails.yanime.org/rssfwd/index
It seems to format very nicely. And since it goes to a website, either the feed owner or the feed reader can set it up.
Thanks Rebecca – that one definately does what I was looking for. A single email with a single entire post. Now for a little HTML programming and an embedded RSS feed, and we’ll see if we can present a form for folks to simply plug in their email address to have any given feed sent to them.
Paul,
Just thought I’d let you know that I added blog entry previews to Bot A Blog late last week. It doesn’t give you the entire entry, but it does have a preview. Thanks for the linkage.
I’m doing this right now. I’ll post the complete thing on The RSS Blog when I’m finished.
http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/
Here’s the Beta announcement of my Rmail service.
http://www.kbcafe.com/juice/?guid=20050424102714
You can also look at rss2mail from http://mamchenkov.net/wordpress/2005/02/12/rss2mail/ (a perl script)
or a beta service called “era” at http://era.indecorous.com/email.html.
You can also try RMail. You’ll receive the post in the email as well as a link.
http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/rss2smtp.aspx
If you use the Mailing List software called PHPlist ( http://tincan.co.uk/phplist ), it has a function that turns RSS feeds into a mailing list, so that you can manage it just like a mailing list (have a subscribe page, customize the email that goes out, etc.). Unfortunately, it’s difficult to set up, and I still don’t have it working properly. 🙁 If anyone figures it out, let me know.
I’ve started a BlinkList ( http://www.blinklist.com/joe/RSS%20to%20Email/ ) of all the RSS to email options I’ve come across… it’s in my to do list to figure out which one will work best for my situation.
Feeds to E-mail
I love it when things like this happen: A client asked me about the possibility of converting XML feeds to e-mail, which is something I was going to look up for an upcoming talk anyway.