This is a test post to see how/whether RMail works with my blog. If it does then I should receive an email about this entry being posted.

Perhaps I’ll say a few additional words about what’s going on here given that not many people seem to know what RSS means. According to Wikipedia: “RSS provides short descriptions of web content together with links to the full versions of the content. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. In addition to facilitating syndication, RSS allows a website’s frequent readers to track updates on the site using a news aggregator.”

People can track updates to selected Web sites by getting feeds from them. This allows tracking content without actually having to visit each Web site of interest separately. Rather, RSS readers (e.g. Bloglines) aggregate the feeds and present them in one location. However, not many people seem to use such services. I have set up a few (I have an account on Bloglines and I have also set up some feeds using the Live Bookmarks feature of Firefox, which can add feeds to the Bookmarks menu of the browser), but I don’t tend to use them much. Instead, I’ve always thought receiving email notification of new posts would be ideal. RMail is supposed to do just that. I’ll see if it works. (I’m also curious to know how it handles updates to a post that’s already been published. If it sends out a separate email each time an entry is updated then I’ll want to be careful about tweaking a post after putting it up on the blog.)

UPDATE: It works! I did get notification of the post, although not immediately. I have since been able to test it on the post that follows this one as well. That notification arrived about half an hour after the entry had been posted to the blog. That sounds good to me. I don’t have to hear immediately. So I have now added some more feeds to RMail and will see how it works. I wish there was an easier URL though. I always think to look for rmail.com, but then realize the URL starts with k. Is rmail.kbcafe.com a possibility Randy?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005 at 9:32 pm and is filed under IT/Comm, Products/Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.