While RSS and atom feeds provide a very powerful and convenient way to track many weblogs an discussions, not everyone is comfortable with them. We have had many requests for an email-update facility. Over the past couple weeks, Steve has implemented and tested a system for subscribing to weblogs for email updates. To subscribe for email updates, log in and look in the "Syndicate this weblog" sidebar near the bottom of the sidebars column in a weblog, and click the Email updates... 'Subscribe' link (see screenshot)

. You will get an email whenever someone posts an entry to that weblog. The link changes to 'Unsubscribe' when you are already subscribed to a weblog. You can stop getting notifications by clicking that 'Unsubscribe' link. The emails are sent to the email address you specified when you joined the site; you can change your preferred email address at any time by logging in and clicking the 'my preferences' link in your personal tools link. The screenshot below shows the personal tools links.

When you are logged in, you will see a 'My Discussions' link in your personal tools links (at the top right of the content area of site pages... from a weblog, click on your login name first to see these links). Click that link to go to a page where you can manage (remove) your existing subscriptions and view recent entries gathered from all the weblogs you subscribe to. See the screenshot to the left (click the thumbnail for a full-size image in a new window).

We will be enhancing some of these features in the future. For instance, users may prefer to get 'digest' emails instead of individual emails for every post - they may want 'One Big Digest' email gathering updates across all their subscriptions, or may wan these split by weblog, etc. Users may wan the same power in choosing email updates that they presently have for RSS feeds - by category, etc (see my recent post on available RSS feeds for more on the variety of available RSS feeds. In addition, we have most of the work in place for adding any indivudla entry or reply to 'my discussions' - this would allow users to temporarily subscribe to an entry or reply they are interested in. Another possible future feature would be to hav a persoanl preference for getting email updates automatically to anything that you post.

Watch this space for news on progress towards such new features later this summer. I think the system as Steve has implemented it so far is great, though, and is exactly what our users asked for.