What I’ve done is to create a separate “excerpts only” feed that I send to FeedBlitz. I recognize that readers (if they are anything like me) don’t want long email messages every day. So, FeedBlitz sends them brief excerpts of all the posts I’ve made today, and if the recipients want more they just click through to my website. I’ve noticed that other people also include things like recent Flickr photos and recent delicious links in their FeedBlitz as well.

By the way, I believe FeedBlitz is separate from FeedBurner. They just have an agreement that makes it easier to set up FeedBlitz through your FeedBurner account.

A lot of people (not so much students as people who have already entered the “real world) are at the limits of what they’re comfortable using, and while they COULD learn to do more if they absolutely had to, they will fight tooth and nail rather than develop new skills.

So in that regard RSS to your inbox is a great idea. Will I ever use it? No way, I love my aggregator.

I am happy to report that I’ve now moved far enough into the “blog-world” that I see the value, use
of having an aggregator! I attended a great workshop this weekend put on by Tim Wilson (The “Savvy Technologist”)that helped me move my blogging skills up a notch. Now I’m subscribing to a few more people and understanding the RSS feed stuff a little more. Maybe starting with following a few good blogs (as webpages) is not such a bad start for us “newbies” – definitely helped get me into this all. Who knows, maybe I’ll start writing soon myself!

Thanks for the good ideas / discussions.
Amy Hendrickson

I have about 3 blogs that I read near daily – I just go to them as webpages from my internet dropbox. I also have a few more listed on a Bloglines account, which I check, also. To me, as someone new to this all, Bloglines is almost “too much pressure” – I see that I have new posts in my Bloglines account and it’s almost like looking at the stack of newspapers sitting on my kitchen table. We subscribe to the paper, but rarely read it daily – then you feel sort of guilty that you even subscribed. Sometimes I feel that way with Bloglines – I don’t want to be one of those people with 3500 posts that they haven’t read, so sometimes I just click on the link to clear the numbers of new posts.

From the 3 blogs I read daily, I follow links and read other blogs. Sometimes, when I have enough time, I just search for stuff that interests me. You note that “You go to an aggregator when you’re ready to read your news, it doesn’t just force it out to you.” Isn’t that what all of us “newbies” are doing when we just check the blogs as websites? On a slow, rural internet link, it takes about the same amount of time for a webpage to come up as it does for the link on Bloglines to come up – so it’s not too much of a time saver. Just wondering what I’m missing as the difference / benefits to an “aggregator” (if that’s what Bloglines is?) Thanks – Amy H.

I guess one way around this would be to set up rules in my email program to send all of my feeds into a particular “aggregator” folder. Then, I could just focus on that when I want to. In the end, I guess I like my Bloglines account just the way it is.

By the way, I followed your instructions that you mentioned a few weeks ago about setting up a pre-populated Bloglines account and sent that list to two people just to test their response. Both said they had an easy time getting registered, and both said they saw a few interesting posts that caught their attention. I think this is a good method to hook some people in and introduce them to what RSS is.