Vtube all about Technology: Following

The Follow-by-email gadget uses Feedburner's email-subscription service. It's very easy to add to your blog, but there are some things that you need to think about if you are using it to deliver blog-posts to your followers by email.

The Follow-by-Email gadget is a very simple way to give your readers access to blog-updates by email: it delivers a message in their inbox every day that you post.

But to decide if it's a good thing to use, to get good value from it, and to troubleshoot any problems, you need to understand a little more about how it works.

And, since it uses Feedburner, this means understanding how Feedburner works, too.

What is Feedburner

The Follow by Email gadget uses a product called Feedburner to manage the list of people who have followed, ie subscribed to your blog.

Feedburner was originally a tool to enhance the RSS subscriptions that website-owners delivered - see Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for your blog for info about RSS. Very roughly speaking, every time a website publishes a new item, Feedburner adds that item to a "feed" or summary of the site, and tells all the subscribers about it, without the subscribers having to visit the website.

One option that Feedburner added was subscribe-by-email: website owners who use Feedburner for this have to turn the service on, and then put "something" on their website that offers the service to people who want to get emailed updates. To start with, Feedburner just kept a list of emails addresses, but now it's more sophisticated: it checks with addresses that they really do want to be subscribed before adding them to the list, and offers an un-subscribe option with each subscription email.

Adding the follow-by-email option to your blog sets this up for you. It:

Sets up a feed,
Turns the email service "on", and
Puts an email--address request box onto your blog.

What is set up when you add the follow-by-email gadget

The Follow-by-email gadget can be added to your blog the same way you would add any other gadget. Doing this this means that, you are logged in to a Google account at the time.

If that Google account already owns an entry (ie a "feed") in Feedburner for the blog you're adding the gadget to, then the gadget just uses this feed.

But if the Google account doesn't currently have an entry from the blog, then a new feed is created, and the email service is turned on for it.:

The Feed Title is based on the blog's name.
The feed address appears to be fairly random (eg I created one for a blog called "Another test blog", and the feed name is http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/meaUW

Advantages of the Follow-by-email gadget

This gadget makes it a lot easier to offer a follow-by-email option: you don't have to set up the feed yourself, or use a HTML-gadget to provide a subscribe-by-email form.

And because it uses Feedburner, you have full access to Feedburner's statistics, and a number of other things that are included in Feedburner's features, including:

Customizing the "click the link to subscribe" message,
Getting a list of all your email subscribers (verified and unverified), and
Configuring the look-and-feel (including timing and from-address) of the daily email to your follow-by-emailers.

Disadvantages of the Follow-by-email gadget

There are some disadvantages of both the gadget, and the approach that Blogger has used to implement it:

Google / Blogger have mixed up the words "subscribers" and "followers". It used to be that subscribers used RSS gadgets (from Feedburner or other feed-providers), and followers used Blogger's own following-tools. But this new gadget is called "follow-by-email", and it's possible that mixing up the ideas will make some people very confused.

Using the gadget, you have very little control over the look and feel of the follow-by-email option on your blog.

Compare this to the "Get updates by email" option which is in the top of the sidebar on this blog: I've put a lot of effort into getting the wording "just right" so potential subscribers know that they will be getting a please-confirm email. This on-screen wording means that even if they don't act on the email immediately, they get another reminder about if they come back to the blog again in the future.
You have no control over the message that potential follow-by-emailers are shown to tell them to verify their subscription. It looks like this

While this message is fine for the tech-minded people who are likely subscribe to an RSS feed, it will probably bring a glazed look to those of your visitors who need a very simple subscribe-by-email option!

People who follow your blog by email will not be included in your Followers gadget or count - though you can use the Feedcount button to show how many subscribers your blog has.

People who subscribe to your blog by email don't see any of the widgets on your blog, or any advertisements. (Unlike regular RSS-feed subscribers for whom you can set up AdSense for feeds). Despite the options mentioned above, ou have very little control over how they see your messages, especially if they happen to be using email software that shows your messages in plain text.

Customizing the "click the link to subscribe" message

Getting a list of all your email subscribers

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for your blog

The Follow-by-Email gadget: a very simple way to give your readers access to blog-updates by email

Blogger have made it very simple to offer an email-subscription to your blog, with the "Follow by Email" gadget. This article describes adding it to your blog, and how it works for your readers.

Previously, I've explained why RSS is important for your blog, and how to give your blog a subscribe by email option using Feedburner.

The Follow by Email gadget that Blogger provide makes this even easier: you can add an email subscription option to your blog by following these steps:

How to add the Follow by Email Gadget

Log in to Blogger
Use a Google account with admin rights to the blog, and which you want to use to get statistics about your email subscribers.
Go to the Design tab
Select Add a Gadget in the area where you want to put the email subscription option
Choose Follow by Email (it's current at the top of the list)
Enter the title that you want displayed on your blog (initially it's "Follow by email")
Press Save.

This puts the gadget onto your blog. But there are two more things that you should do:

Check that your blog's RSS feed is enabled: it should be either "Full" or "Until Jump Break", not "None". You need to do this because the Follow-by-email tool will only send out emails if your feed is turned on.

Subscribe to it yourself- by entering your own email.
This isn't absolutely essential - the tool works even if you're not signed up to it. But it's a good idea to try to see your blog from the reader's perspective.
And some items in your posts (eg slideshows or PowerPoint presentations) may not work as expected in the emailed version - and you won't know about it unless you're getting the emails.

What your readers see:

On Your Blog:

The Follow by Email gadget looks like this:

The title was set when you were adding the gadget: you can change it by editing the gadget in the usual way.

The background colour, button colour, title underline and font are based on the settings for your theme: you can only control them by editing the gadget colours in your theme.

You cannot put text immediately before our after the place where people can enter an email address: though you could put a text-gadget before or after the Follow-by-email gadget.

When they enter an email address:

When your visitor enters an email address and presses Submit, a new window opens:

This window:

Welcomes them to Feedburner
Acknowledges their Google account, if they are logged in at the time - remember, not all your visitors will be Google users
Tells them about the feed that they are asking to subscribe to
Warns them that a confirmation message will be sent to the email address they entered
"will receive a verification message once you submit this form" and that "FeedBurner activates your subscription to ... once you respond to this verification message"
Asks them to solve a text-catpcha puzzle, to prove it's a real person (not a computer) setting up the subscription.

The colours, design and content of this window are totally controlled by Feedburner. You can't influence them in any way.

After the anti-spam-test is successfully completed, a second screen opens. This tells the reader that

Your request has been accepted! Please check your inbox for a verification message from “FeedBurner Email Subscriptions”, the service that delivers email subscriptions for <<your-blog-name>>. You will need to click a link listed in this message to activate your subscription. If you dont see a confirmation e-mail in a reasonable amount of time please check your bulk/spam folder.

Again, you have no control over the color, format or placement of this window, it is totally up to Feedburner. You also don't control the message text, which many people are likely to ignore.

In their email in-box, today:

Your potential subscriber gets an email from Feedburner, usually within 2-10 minutes, asking them to click a link to complete the subscription process.

If they click the link, they become a verified subscriber.

If they don't click the link, then they stay on the subscribers list as unverified.

You can customize the "click the link to subscribe" message, using some fairly simply settings in Feedburner.

In their email in-box, when you post:

On days when you have posted to your blog, every verified subscriber is sent one email message, with all your posts during the day.

The message may include the full post or just a summary, depending on what settings you have for your blog's RSS feed (Settings > Site Feed > Blog Posts feed).

Feedburner provides a number of options for controling how this email looks, and when it is sent: see the Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email branding tab in Feedburner for these. (full article coming soon).

More information about the gadget:

This new gadget has been widely requested, and is an exciting addition to Blogger. But there are some challenges with it, which are discussed in Understanding the Follow-by-Email gadget.

You can get a list of the people who have signed up to receive your blog-posts by email - be aware that this is all people who have subscribed, not just ones who used the widget.

What happens if you delete the widget

Even if the follow-by-email gadget is deleted from your blog (by accident or deliberately), the Feedburner subscription that it created, and the list of people who have subscribed, is still kept in Feedburner.

However to add the gadget to your blog again, you need to use Feedburner's gadget tool to make sure that you access the feed that you created when you added the gadget the first time around.

(Thanks to reader +Mary Bostow whose question got me thinking about this.)

Why RSS is important for your blog,

How to get a list of people who are subscribed to your blog by email

An alternative to "Follow-by-email": giving your blog a subscribe by email option using Feedburner.

Customizing Feedburners verification message

Wednesday, 26 July 2017

Understanding the Follow-by-Email gadget and Feedburner