Trying something new – RSS to email

There are quite a few blogs I like to follow and I visited them regularly to see if there was an update. But since the update intervals for each of these were very different, regularly visiting wasn’t really working for me. Some of them post once a day, some of them once a week and others only once per month or so.

A while ago I was thinking about this problem. I know there’s RSS but using a RSS reader leads to the same problem with a different interface. I rather be notified then pull since these are low volume blogs with some having a highly irregular posting interval.

Another option is Twitter, but the signal-to-noise of Twitter is in general too low for me to bother with it.

Then I came across this post from Fred Wilson where you can subscribe to his RSS feed via email. I was wondering if there was a generic solution, just enter the URL and your email to get notifications of new posts in your email. Since I won the newsletter battle I’ve a relative well managed inbox and this seems to me the perfect solution to my problem.

I found Blogtrottr which does exactly that. You enter the URL and it automatically finds the feeds (either atom or RSS). You enter your email, confirm your subscription and you’re done.

I’ve been using it for a month now and it’s perfect.