Email subscription changing

Posted on by John

Email subscription for this site has been provided by Google Feedburner. This service is going away in July.

I don’t know yet what I will replace Feedburner with. Do any of you know of an alternative that automatically sends out email when there’s a new post?

I use Mail Chip to distribute by monthly newsletter, but I wouldn’t want to send out a “newsletter” manually with Mail Chimp every time I write a post.

RSS had a near-death experience when Google killed their popular RSS reader, but RSS still works. I much prefer RSS to email, but not everyone feels the same.

You can find more about RSS, email, and newsletter subscription to this blog here. You can also find my Twitter accounts here.

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13 thoughts on “Email subscription changing”

  1. Daniel Lemire

    I went with mailchimp. It works. I lost 3% of my subscribers in the process but it is unclear whether these people were actual subscribers in the first place.

    I find their UI confusing, but feedburner was not exactly great to begin with.

    So far so good.

  2. Ed

    I read your blog as RSS, and my web-based reader of choice says there are 555 subscribers. Sounds pretty good!

  3. John

    Thanks, Ed.

    I lost a lot of subscribers when Google killed Reader, but traffic didn’t go down.

  5. Dave

    I subscribe via RSS to this and many other blogs. Unfortunately I don’t have a recommendation for you, but wanted to provide that feedback.

  8. BobC

    Google tells me there are several RSS-to-email tools and services out there, though I’ve never had a reason to try any of them.

    Another option would be to move email subscribers to RSS via a simple tool, such as an RSS browser extension. I use Smart RSS for Chrome-based browsers, and it has a similar feel to an email inbox. Unfortunately, it seems Smart RSS is no longer actively maintained, though the old-but-current version still works fine for me.

  9. Mailchimp offers a way to send email automatically based on an RSS feed. You just point it to your existing RSS feed, decide how often do you want to send emails (daily, weekly) and it will work.

    You can also create segments among your subscribers. For example, some people (eg: me) are following you on RSS, so they wouldn’t like to receive every post by email, but they would like to receive your monthly newsletter. This can be done easily in Mailchimp and users can then select what they want to receive (monthly emails, per post emails or both).

  10. RSS if far from being dead. Your blog is one of some 200+ blogs I subscribe with NewsBlur, and at the moment there are 1029 other NewsBlur users subscribed to your blog. NewsBlur is just one of many cloud RSS readers (and it’s neither the best nor the most popular) so I’m pretty sure your actual numbers are in the 10K range if not better.

    From what I can tell, your blog is WordPress-based. WordPress can email subscribers with new posts using standard Jetpack subscribing mechanism (not sure how to migrate your existing userbase though – you may want to reach out to JetPack customer service for that). It can also handle your monthly newsletter by the way.

  11. Mailchimp has an API, so theoretically you could write your own RSS-to-E-Mail translator. I‘ve only worked with that API for adding new subscribers, not for actual e-mail sending, but I think the latter should also be possible. Probably that is not a trivial effort, but it would save you from the manual labor in the long run.

  12. Ted

    RSS through Feedly here. I am new (subscribing just now) and it says 11K followers. Please keep RSS alive

  13. John

    I’m definitely keeping the RSS feed; I’m deciding what to do about email subscription.

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