A great thing about Active Rain is that I can use it as a testing ground for features I am considering for "outside blogs".
Case in point: FeedBlitz. You'll notice I installed the FeedBlitz subscription widget in the right column column of my Active Rain Blog. Readers wanting to subscribe to the blog by email can just enter their email address and click "subscribe me".
And since I always test things things all the way through ....
After clicking on "subscribe me" a reader will be taken to the verification page, like this:
Followed by an instruction/disclaimer page like this:
And they are sent a activation email, that they must respond to in order to activate the subscription, like this:
OK. I think most of my outside blog readers can handle this. Now to get the other blogs set up on the FeedBlitz "Newsletter" program.
I'll post my info on how to do ~that~ later.
Cheryl- Just to confirm (sorry if you have previously mentioned this or I missed it elsewhere) - non-members can subscribe this way and they will get our AR blogs? And only the ones that are public? Thanks.
Steve: Good Question. I logged out and tried it in Flock (not my usual browser - so no cache or cookies saved to confuse the issue) Yes, non-members can subscribe, no problem. All recent public posts are view-able in the preview mode:
Thank you for giving me something to ponder. Ill be checking back at your blog often.
this looks cool, but i ponder if the readers will get confused with the my regular newsletter sign up? i think this is something i can talk to my web guru about
cheers,
cindy
Cindy -- If you offer both, and they're two different animals, yeah, you'd want to make it clear to people: Subscribe to Newsletter here ... Subscribe to Blog here ....
But in my case, that particular blog and that particular newsletter offered the same content. It was silly to be doing double work. Feedblitz allowed me to let the blog do double duty as the newsletter. The content published on the blog gets repackaged by FeedBlitz into the newsletter.
People can either subscribe to the newsletter, subscribe to the blog by RSS, or go to the blog. It's all the same content, and I only have to publish it once.