Add Email Notification to Your Blog with FeedBurner
Date: Feb 9, 2007
Blog readers can check most blogs for new content by using a web browser to visit the blog, or by setting up an RSS reader to subscribe to the blog’s feed. But these methods aren’t practical for the millions of folks who don’t surf the Web regularly, or subscribe to RSS feeds. For many people, a better way to stay in the loop is email notification, which can bring readers directly to a site when it posts content that interests them.
With FeedBurner, setting up email notification is both easy and free. Best of all, it’s a "set it up and forget it" process, requiring no maintenance at all. And unlike other services, it doesn’t generate any spam or add your subscribers to junk email lists. I know—I use it to subscribe to my own blogs!
This article explains how you can set up FeedBurner’s email notification feature for your blog.
Step 1: Set Up a FeedBurner Account
I’m not going to explain exactly how to do this. It’s pretty straightforward and easy to do. (If you already have a FeedBurner account, just sign into your account and skip ahead to the next section.)
Start by going to the FeedBurner site. Click the Register link at the top of the page to display a Register page (see Figure 1). Enter a login name, password (twice), secret question, and the answer to the secret question. Then click Sign In.
)
Figure 1 If you don’t already have a FeedBurner account, use this form to register.
Step 2: "Burn" Your Feed with FeedBurner
If you’ve already burned your feed with FeedBurner, move on to the section "Step 4: Setting Up the Email Notification Feature." Otherwise, on FeedBurner’s main page, locate the box labeled "Burn a feed right this instant" (see Figure 2). In the box, enter the complete URL for your blog’s existing RSS feed.
)
Figure 2 Use this box to enter the URL for the feed you want to burn.
Before you can enter the URL, you need to know what it is. The URL you use depends on the blogging software you’re using. For example, if you’re using WordPress on your own server (that’s my setup), the URL will look something like this:
http://www.marialanger.com/?feed=rss2
If you’re using WordPress on a free WordPress.com account, the URL for your feed will be more like this:
http://wpvqs.wordpress.com/feed/
Of course, in either case, you’d replace my domain name or account name (shown in italics here) with yours.
If you’re using some other blogging software, check the documentation or settings to find out what your RSS feed URL is. (An RSS feed is a standard feature for all the blogging software packages I know.)
http://www.marialanger.com/?feed=rss2&cat=24
Ignore the "I am a podcaster!" check box unless the feed is for a podcast. If it is, you’re reading the wrong article. I wrote an earlier article for Informit that explains how to burn a feed for podcasting. Follow those instructions first, and then come back here and add the email notification feature as discussed later in this article.
When the correct URL is in the box, click Next. If all goes well, FeedBurner displays a screen like the one shown in Figure 3, and you can move on to the next section of this article. Otherwise, go back and troubleshoot the problem based on the information FeedBurner provides in the error message it displays. Reread the information in the preceding paragraphs and try again. Good luck!
)
Figure 3 Enter your feed info here.
Step 3: Providing Basic Feed Information
After your blog or feed address has been verified (refer to Figure 3 in the preceding section), enter a title and a feed address (or URL) for your feed. My advice is to make the Feed Title descriptive and the Feed Address short. That probably means not using the default settings that FeedBurner provides.
When you’re happy with what you’ve entered, click Activate Feed. Then, in the Congrats! screen that appears, click the "Skip directly to feed management" link.
Step 4: Setting Up the Email Notification Feature
If you already had a FeedBurner feed before beginning this article, log into your FeedBurner account, click the name of the feed in the My Feeds list, and click the Publicize tab. We should all be on the same page now.
The Publicize tab offers options for publicizing your feed. You can explore most of them on your own. Right now, the only one we’re interested in is Email Subscriptions. Click that button in the navigation bar to view its options (see Figure 4).
)
Figure 4 The Email Subscriptions setup page before subscriptions have been set up.
As Figure 4 shows, FeedBurner offers several options for notification. Before FeedBurner’s service was available, I tried FeedBlitz, with very little success. I’ve found that FeedBurner’s service is easiest to use and most reliable. If you want to try one of the others, be my guest, but please don’t ask me for help.
Make sure that the FeedBurner option is selected and then click Activate. The service is turned on, and the screen refreshes with code that you’ll need to put in your blog (see Figure 5).
)
Figure 5 The service is activated and FeedBurner displays custom code for your feed.
Step 5: Adding a Subscription Form or Link to Your Blog Template
Remember, I’m using WordPress, so that’s what the instructions in this section will cover in detail. If you’re using another blogging tool, you might have to do some research to handle this task for your blog. The FeedBurner site offers some help, and you should be able to find assistance in your blogging tool’s help system.
You have a choice on how users can subscribe to the email notification feature—by filling in a form on your site, or by clicking a link and filling in a form that appears. I use the form in the sidebar of my site because I can modify my template files easily. If you can’t modify template files, you’ll probably need to add the subscription feature as a link.
To add a subscription form, start by selecting and copying the contents of the Subscription Form Code box (refer to Figure 5 in the preceding section). Click in the box, choose Edit > Select All, and then choose Edit > Copy (or use the corresponding shortcut keys). Then open the blog template file where you want the form to go (usually sidebar.php for a WordPress blog, but it could be something else), position the insertion point where you want the form to appear, and paste in the code. Then save the file.
Keep in mind that, depending on the theme your blog is using, you may have to modify the code so that it properly utilizes the theme’s CSS. For example, Figure 6 shows how the code looks in my sidebar.php file; Figure 7 shows the resulting form on a blog page. This might be a trial-and-error process; be sure you check the appearance of the form after you save it. You can find more information about modifying themes in WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide.
)
Figure 6 Here’s the form code for my blog’s sidebar, integrated with existing links for RSS.
)
Figure 7 Here’s how that code looks on the page when viewed with a web browser.
If messing around with templates and code is more than you want to deal with, or if you don’t have the ability to modify your templates at all, you can add a link to the subscription code to your site. That process is a bit easier.
If you have a WordPress.com blog (as opposed to a WordPress server installation), I recommend that you add the subscription link as a regular link with the bookmarks (formerly "links") feature. Open a new web browser window or tab and use it to open the Dashboard for your blog. Click the Add a Bookmark link. I hope it will still be there; the WordPress folks keep modifying the administration features on WordPress.com. (And it’s driving me nuts!)
Now switch back to the FeedBurner Email Subscription page, and scroll down to the Subscription Link Code box. Click in the box and select all of the text between the quotation mark (") characters. The text you want should start with http:// and end with a number. Choose Edit > Copy (or use the appropriate shortcut key) to copy the selected text to the clipboard.
Switch back to the WordPress Add Link page. In the Name box, enter the text that will appear for the link. In the Address box, paste in the URL you just copied. In the Description box, enter a description for the link. This description may appear when a site visitor points the link. In the Categories list, turn on the checkbox for an appropriate category. When you’re finished, the result might look something like Figure 8.
)
Figure 8 Use a form like this to add the link.
Click the Add Link button. The link is added to your site and appears with your other links (see Figure 9).
)
Figure 9 The link has been added to a WordPress.com blog’s Blogroll list.
Keep in mind that if you want to add the link to a template file, you need to copy the entire contents of the Subscription Link Code box (refer to Figure 5) and paste that code into the template.
Step 6: Testing Your Work
Time to test whether your efforts have paid off. Open your blog and use the form or link to subscribe to your feed. It’s a two-step process: You provide your email address, and then verify it. This approach prevents email addresses from being added to the subscription list by someone other than the subscriber.
Now you can sit back and let FeedBurner deliver notification of new content to your email box, just as it delivers it to other subscribers. This is a good way to monitor what FeedBurner does.
Exactly what does FeedBurner do? Each night, it checks to see what new posts have appeared in your RSS feed since the previous night. It takes the RSS feed content, formats it nicely, and delivers it as an email message to everyone on its list. The message has clickable links, so if you publish a summary feed (most people do), the email message recipient can click a link in the message to go right to the corresponding post. Recipients never get more than one message per day. If there weren’t any new posts since the previous night, FeedBurner doesn’t send a thing. It doesn’t send spam, either.
Conclusion
If you read between the lines here, you probably realize that I’m really sold on this feature. It makes it easy to keep up with new site content, without dealing with web browsers or RSS aggregators. Once it’s set up on your site, you don’t have to do a thing to keep it working. You can get stats on the FeedBurner web site to see how many subscribers you have, and you can even check the list of subscribers to see who’s getting messages. Best of all, it’s free. What else could you ask for?
Maria Langer is a freelance writer and helicopter pilot. She’s the author of more than 60 computer how-to books, including WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide, coauthored with Miraz Jordan. Visit her on the Web at http://www.marialanger.com.