Subscribe2: RSS through Email (Update)

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I’m creating an information blog for my new school. One of my assistant principals asked me about RSS, and as we talked through what he needed, we realized the root of his request was a very manageable email subscription program. He was maintaining a list of over 1000 email addresses to send out biweekly newsletter. I thought we might be able to manage this through a blog.

I searched the WordPress plugin directory and came up with Subscribe2. The plugin lets users have entire or partial posts sent as plain text or HTML to their email. Scubscribe2 uses a conformation system to verify the address, so my assistant principal will have less housecleaning to do. It puts the burden of entering the emails on the community. It’s an efficient way to disperse information to parents and the community via blogging–even to those who are “RSS challenged”. I’m testing it on my instruction and technology blog. I’ll have the information blog up by the end of the week. Look for an update after we’ve tested it for a couple months .

Download Link

Update:  After playing with Subscribe2 for a week, I realized it was not fulfilling the needs we had.  I uninstalled it and, thanks to the advice of Chris Craft, switched to Feedblitz.   We have been very happy with Feedblitz for a number of reasons.  The service sends out a confirmation email to all subscribers–screening out improperly entered or fake emails from the start.  You are able to manage your list in your Feedblitz account, so I don’t have to download a data file each time you want to make changes to the list.  We do need to moderate when we post new material.  Since the free service sends the material once a day and we don’t want our parents and community bombarded with emails, we make it a point to hold our posts until they can be grouped together.  The only wish we have is for a name field so we can associate the email address with an actual person in the community.  Overall, we are more than pleased with Feedblitz, and several other high schools in our county have adopted it for their communication blogs.

4 thoughts on “Subscribe2: RSS through Email (Update)

  1. Of course http://www.feedblitz.com/ does the same thing, just without the possibility of a plugin that can break or become outdated with new versions of wordpress. I believe Feedburner offers email subscriptions as well.

    The other question would be why not just use a standard listserv? Mailman is pretty powerful and runs on pretty much any web server (python based). A blog is a good way to disseminate information but you have to train the community how to use a blog or how to subscribe. With mailman you could enter all the email addresses in and then they’d already be subscribed and it would handle unsubscribed and bounces for you.

    Just some thoughts..

    Chris

  2. Hey Chris,

    Thanks for the suggestions. I’m going to look at them this week. I showed my asst. principal what I had so far. He couldn’t help smiling!

    Jim

  3. we have same experienxe,first i use subscribe2 then i moved to feedblitz weell im still focusing on feedblitz, my autoresponder on feed blitz doin so well but i have diffiiculties in set up newsletter…hmmby the way hoe to set up subscribe2 so that the email receive by subscriber is entire post not half post from my blog, i cant find that..thx

  4. Hi all,

    I’ve added the categories on the version 4.11. Now you can send customized emails depending on the category. Great !

    How to install
    1- download susbscribe2.txt here: http://www.2shared.com/file/4433170/5fa070ec/subscribe2.html
    2- replace .txt by .php
    3- replace old file
    4- create html emails by placing custom design images in /CATEGORY/ folder

    It’s gonna boost your conversions !

    best,

    Josh

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