Question to Readers: Email Notifications Desirable?
I’m considering adding an email notification service to this site.
Update May 14: feature is implemented and available.
It would be 100% opt in*, and simple in concept: links to new blog entries (not the content itself) would generate an email notification for those who had signed up. Whether it would be one email for each blog entry or once a day with all new entries or once a week would likely be configurable options.
Whether there is sufficient interest to justify such a feature is not clear to me. Feedback welcome on whether the idea is of interest. Note that this site’s RSS feed or Twitter page is the nominally “correct” way to check for updates, but is less than convenient for many users, due to no built-in support in browsers like Safari. RSS is still a nerd feature in reality.
* “Opt in” means receiving emails only by explicitly active choice to do so.
UPDATE: many readers simply visit the site and indeed that is what I do with all the sites I follow. But there are some who like email notification. Still, mail is running strongly in favor of “no use for it”.
Tip: a good way to check multiple web sites efficiently is to create a tab group which opens a group of sites with one click. Then cmd-W to close each in turn. In this way one can check a dozen sites in a matter of a minute or less. Apple Safari also has a “Top Sites” feature that can be used to see reduced sized versions of many sites at a glance.