If your blog or website targets technically savvy readers you can be pretty sure that they will be conversant with the RSS feeds generated by your site.

However, in the real world, the majority of visitors to commercial or business related sites will have little or no idea of what an RSS feed is. Worse still, they will not be in a position to be advised when you post new information on your site.

This is why I created RSS:Forward, a service which converts any site’s RSS feed into email messages. In simple terms, a subscriber will receive an email message with the introductory part of any new addition to the site, along with a link to the page where they can read the full content.

Now all we need is a simple mechanism to allow our visitors to subscribe to the RSS:Forward service. Generic instructions for adding subscription buttons, forms etc can be found here.

But, if your site is a Wordpress blog, I’ve made it even easier for you by releasing the RSS:Forward Plugin.

Full details, and the download files, are here

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RSS:Forward is a free service which converts RSS feeds to email. In simple terms it will allow you to subscribe to a feed and have the content of the feed delivered to your inbox. This means that you do not have to install, configure and learn another software application (an “aggregator” in this case) to take advantage of the wealth of timely information available via RSS feeds.

Subscribing to a feed

If the site that you are interested in supports autodiscovery all that you have to do is make a note of the home page address (or copy the address from the addressbar of your browser), go to the subscribe page of RSS:Forward and enter that address (or paste the copied address) into the URL text field and click on “Submit”.

RSS:Forward will then check for the feed location, show you a preview of the feed content and ask for your email address to complete the process.

If the site does not support autodiscovery, you will have to find the URL of the feed itself. This generally involves a bit of messing around with the subscription links on the site.

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Your site has an RSS feed, right? If so you’ll have some form of link to the feed on your page. But you can go one step further with auto-discovery.

Adding a RSS feed auto-discovery to your web site is essentially a usability feature. It allows modern browsers capable of RSS auto discovery such as Firefox or Safari, and the next version of Internet Explorer, to display a nice RSS icon RSS. Your visitors can then click on the icon to subscribe to the site’s RSS feed within the browsers.

In addition, various RSS tools such as RSS:Forward, can use the auto-discovery feature of your site to easily find the URL of your feed.

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