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April 6, 2006
Can my friends and family sign up for e-mail notification of when I post?
Your readers can subscribe to your RSS feed and they will be notified whenever you post a new entry. They will need an RSS reader of some kind - google, yahoo and most of the web-based email services have these built in to their users' personalized home pages.
If you look to the very top of your blog you'll see some links to "Add this blog to:". If your readers are members of any of those services they can subscribe with one click of those links. If they have their own RSS readers they prefer, they can use the link from the RSS icon.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and basically it means you can receive updates whenever a favourite site of yours adds new content. This is helpful if you only want to visit a site when you know there is something new for you to look at.
To receive blog updates via RSS, you will need an RSS Reader, or Aggregator (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=rss+reader&btnG=Google+Search). If you're new to RSS, it can be a daunting prospect sifting through all the different options and readers that are available. To get started, you might experiment with some simple readers that are bundled in with services you may already use, such as My Yahoo!, Google's personalized home page if you have a gmail account, bloglines.com, blo.gs, etc.
Once you have your reader, you need to give it your favourite blog's RSS feed URL. Click on the RSS box on the upper corner to get this link.
For a more complete list of RSS readers or a more in-depth explanation of RSS, try Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_news_aggregators
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file_format%29
Posted by at April 6, 2006 2:44 PM