For several months now I’ve been testing a new feature over at the just plain cute MailChimp service that they call RSS-to-Email Newsletter; which does exactly what the name implies — automagically convert what I publish on this blog into email form. And now it’s finally ready for the public.
Direct Mail
I’m a big believer in the less-than-glamorous power of email newsletters to drive traffic to sites, and how effective a conduit it is between a site and its audience. For a long time, I had wanted to put together a regularly mailing of some sort, but when I endeavored to start one a while back, I quickly realized that I didn’t have the bandwidth to reliably produce a second channel of content. A good email newsletter is powerful, but it typically requires a lot of effort.
That’s why this feature was just the thing. It simply repurposes what comes over my RSS feed into something that, for many people, is infinitely more consumable than XML. It’s really like getting this site’s home page dropped into your inbox once a day (or the morning following each day I post something, to be more accurate), and for the low, low price of totally free.
If this sounds like the sort of thing that you’re interested in, I encourage you to enter your email into the little subscription form in the right column of the site — those reading via RSS exclusively will have to point your browsers to Subtraction.com to access it. I’ve had this mail form up for a while, but the feature has been in a prolonged testing period, so thank you to the brave souls who signed up without really knowing what you were getting into. The newsletters should start arriving more regularly now, and most of the kinks have been worked out, but I also have to thank everyone in advance if there are a few more hiccups still while I get the hang of this.
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