For years whenever I’ve made new posts on this blog I’ve sent out an email to the current Email Top Ten to let them know about the new post. That has always been a manual process for me. I’ve finally taken the time to automate it. So now when I make a post it will automatically generate those emails for me. Woo.
(Well, that is true as long as I post in the “normal” way. If I pre-publish so that a post will automatically get posted at a time in the future I have it set to just send an email to me. Same if I post something but for some reason mark it as “Closed”. Also, if I ever get the blogger API thing working again so I can post from a blogging app on my phone, it won’t send the email then either, although I think I now know how to add that… if only that functionality would work at all any more. It hasn’t since a MySQL update a few months ago.)
Anyway, I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile and finally did. Go me.
Now, I only need to catch up on my counting for the email top ten so that the current list of people emailed isn’t the email addresses who won it in October 2004… two of which are now invalid and always bounce. Oops.
One more note of interest… this is the first time in quite some time I’ve made a second post in a single day. I’d been sticking to the “one post a day” thing, but maybe I’ll switch that to “at least one post a day”. Of course, regardless it is only a matter of time until I get busy one day and miss a day entirely again. But that will be OK.
So, wouldn’t FeedBurner Email handle most of what you want (since apparently some of your readers are unwilling to use a feed reader/aggregator?)
It does not appear that it could do what I want. Two important things:
* It is not tied directly to the list of people on my top ten list from the most recent month I have counted. It looks like it might be possible for people to ask not to get the email, or alternately for additional people to get the email.
* I’m not sure I would properly get the bounce emails from the two email addresses currently on the list that ceased to exist years ago.
* It digests on a daily basis rather than being one per post (or at least allows that option).
* It doesn’t appear that I could control it to the degree necessary to ensure the format of the email was identical to the format I’ve used for the past few years. (Note what I just launched did involve a very minor compromise in format, but it was very minor.)
* It involves using a third party service I don’t have direct control over. I am a bit of a control freak. It bothers me somewhat that my blog is hosted by Chris in Virginia rather than running from a machine in my own house, let alone using something like feedburner. Yeah, it provides some additional functionality I don’t have (of which this is only one example), but I’d have to let go a bit, and I don’t like that.
* Finally, the idea misses the main reason for these emails. Your comment indicates that in some way I do this to be of some sort of service to my readers. That would be false. I do it because I have done it in the past, and I am OCD and thus would be upset by stopping. Way back when, the idea was to poke at people who email me a lot, but who do NOT read the blog, to let them know they should. :-)