RSS icon If you're the least little bit concerned about your RSS feed subscriber count, then why aren't you offering RSS feeds by email? Unlike feedreaders, RSS email subscriptions count toward your total feed count every day until the subscribers go through the act of unsubscribing, whether the email is read or not. With feedreaders, your subscribers actually have to open their feedreaders every day and let them pull in the feeds. Now, I could end this as a soliloquy right here, but I don't think I'll get my point across. Instead, I'll give you a brief history of my problems and what I'm doing about them.


Feedreader Problems

As many of you know, I gave up on maintaining my RSS feedreader. I announced it with "I'm Spider-Man No More", a really lousy post in my own opinion. Oh well, we can't all be brilliant all the time.

Most of the problems could be attributed to poor connectivity somewhere between my local ISP here in the Philippines and the sources of the feedreader services in the US. The feeds were never up-to-date. Of course, some of them turned out to be dead blogs.

I wasn't commenting on blogs because I wasn't visiting blogs. I was relying on a poor feedreader connection to keep me up-to-date. In essence, using a feedreader was bad juju for me. I stopped using my feedreader and started visiting blogs in person, so to speak. It worked for a while, until I stopped having the time to do it.

The Email Alternative

Over the course of past couple of months, I've been slowly subscribing to feeds by email. Since I have my email client and my browser open at all times when I'm online, I can respond to a feed received this way almost instantly. Of course, it's only once per day, but it's still better than never.

The problem I'm having now is that many, and I mean many, of the blogs I'm trying to subscribe to by email don't offer email as a subscription option. Perhaps the authors don't feel that RSS feeds in general are important or perhaps they don't feel email options in particular are important. Whatever the case may be, they're completely wrong about it. I can look at my analytics statistics for any given day and see that quite a few of my returning visitors are RSS subscribers. Isn't that compelling enough to pay attention to your RSS feeds?

In some cases, it's a genuine error. The theme can have an error in it. A simple typographical error can render the feed address unreachable. Sometimes, the option is available on the page, but the author failed to turn the option on with the feed service. If I spot an error, I'll notify the blog author immediately, as I did with Todd of "Success with Todd". Sometimes they respond and sometimes they don't. Todd did and I appreciate that.

Blogs Without Email Options

I'm going to list some of the blogs or websites in which I can't subscribe to email feeds. Since I'm not using a feedreader anymore, they're stuck as bookmarks until they see the error of their ways.

That was only a fraction of them. Perhaps I'll list more in a day or so. For anyone I've listed: If you don't know how to add an email feed as an option, I'll be happy to give you a hand.