blog

I like getting frequent e-mails from sites I love. It keeps me in tune with what’s going on – be it industry news, current events, or music I like. But, having had a serious case of inbox overflow lately, I’ve switched over to using an RSS reader to keep track of blogs and sites that interest me.

The problem is that not all of my e-mail subscriptions have corresponding RSS feeds.

I’ve been thinking about how to get around that, and I’ve figured out a basic tactic. Here is my [as yet untested] outline.

1. Set up a blog (using a current e-mail address) that will allow you to post via e-mail message.
2. Set up a new e-mail account that allows forwarding.
3. Use that email account to sign up for your preferred e-mail subscriptions.
4. Once you’ve signed up for the e-mail subscriptions you like, set up automatic e-mail forwarding. The forwarding address should be the one your blog service provides.
5. Find the RSS feed address for the blog you’ve just created, and drop that into your reader. Boom. Done.

Possible issues:

1. Copyright. This is re-publishing other people’s content without permission. Do your best to set your blog to private. Even though it’s for personal use, blogs are inherently public.If you’re using a WordPress installation on your own hosting, for example, you could set it so that the posts are hard to find. Set a static home page, and don’t specify a posts page. Remove all links to posts, archives, tags, and search. Find your RSS URL, but don’t leave a link out there.

   WordPress has great SEO – so you could also dig into your theme and remove some of that optimization so that it won’t start popping up in search engines.

2. Why set up an e-mail account with forwarding (steps 2 and 4)? It’s a catch-all to keep an eye on spam and control the flow of content on the blog. You could use the e-mail address your blog service provides to sign up for e-mail subscriptions, but this isn’t an address you can use to change settings. You won’t be able to log in and cancel subscriptions.
3. Keeping the blog private is important, because you’ll occasionally get sensitive e-mail messages with passwords or other account information. If you’re publishing every e-mail message you receive, you may inadvertently post a password reset link on your blog. If you do publish one of these, be sure to delete it!
4. Don’t use that e-mail address for anything else – especially the registration on your blog. See #3.

All right, that’s all I can think of now – let me know if you try this – and I’ll do the same!