New feature: Email subscription!

Don't want to bother checking my site every couple of weeks, waiting for that unreliable new post?  Now you don't have to - just subscribe by email!  There's a handy block on the right side of the page.

Credit for this feature goes to Karsten; I saw it on his blog.

If you're interested in the technical side of all this, read on.  If you're not, then this post is done.

This is a feature I've been trying to provide for a while.  One of my other sites, 69thNewYork.com, has a full-featured newsletter system, but that seemed like overkill for my personal blog.  I'm not trying to create a newsletter, I'm just trying to blog.  There are other modules on Drupal, but none of them seemed right: either they didn't do what I wanted, or they were too complicated.

Along comes Karsten with his simple Wordpress-powered blog with Feedburner integration.  I'd heard of Feedburner before.  My blog does a great job of providing its own rss feed, thank you very much, so I didn't see why I needed another site to do it for me.  I didn't realize they also provided email subscriptions.  I also didn't realize that they are now a Google service.  (These days, who isn't?)

Signing up was a trivial matter, and a few clicks later I had a custom HTML block so people could sign up for email subscriptions.  Couldn't have been simpler or easier.

Not bad for a Sunday morning.  I think I'll get out of bed now.  ;-)

J<