Making feeds friendly, part 2

In my earlier post Making feeds friendly I talked about, well, making feeds friendly. But what about people who don’t, and won’t, use feed readers, at least not yet?

There is an alternate way for people to get new blog posts: email. This mechanism has been around longer than feed readers, with services such as FeedBlitz and more recently FeedBurner making it easy for bloggers to offer this option to readers.

But how do you indicate this option on your blog? Now that one of the ways that feeds have been made more friendly is the advent of the orange “subscribe” button , I think there should be a similar “subscribe” button to subscribe by email. So a little while ago I created one, which looks like this , and although you can see it on this blog there is a much nicer-looking example on my other blog at www.rohansrants.com. Having two white-on-orange icons near each other suggests that there is some linkage between the two: you can subscribe, and here are two ways to do it.

If you have a blog, I encourage you to add a subscribe-by-email option if you haven’t already, and feel free to adopt my signage. (Also feel free to improve the image. For instance, the orange colour isn’t quite the same, and the corners should be chopped off.)