As many of you may know- RSS is a way for you to "subscribe" to a web site so that you are notified whenever something new is posted. More and more sites are creating RSS "feeds" that allow you to subscribe to them without providing an email address. You need a newsreader to "subscribe".(More on RSS basics here)
This entry will describe how you can create an RSS feed and then post information to the feed by sending an email to a specific address.
Robin Good pointed me to a new tool tool that can allow anyone to create an RSS feed using email. Let me explain how it works...
1. You sign up for MAILbyRSS and they send you an email that contains the vital information. The two basic pieces of information are:
- RSS posting email address (for posting)
- RSS channel (for subscribing)
2. Any mesage that you send to the posting address will be converted into an RSS subscription feed. To test, send an email message to the address, open your news reader and add the new RSS channel. You should see your email mesage appear in the newsreader.
3. So, this means that any message you send to that specific email address will be automatically made into an RSS feed.
Possible Uses:
You could add a link on your website for "RSS". The link would be to the "RSS channel" address mentioned above- which people need to be able to subscribe to your news. Then, if you want to post a newsletter, daily comments, etc. to your subscribers, all you have to do is send your post to the RSS posting email address and it will appear in subscriber's RSS feeds.
As Robin mentions, Yahoo! Groups owners can use this tool to create an RSS feed for a Yahoo! Group. In this case, all the group owner would need to do is subscribe the RSS email address to the Yahoo! Group. This way, the messages posted to the group are sent to the RSS email address- which is automatically converted to an RSS feed.