The Kyle File

As part of the switch to a self-hosted blog, I decided to minimize the number of third-party services I depend on to make everything work. So after a good deal of fiddling, I have been able to cut the cord that was tying me to Feedburner. WordPress has built-in RSS feeds, both for posts and for comments, and I don’t have any problems with either of them. Even better, I was able to install a plugin that allows readers to subscribe to e-mail updates from a very easy-to-use form that I put right in the sidebar. No more clicking on a link that takes you to an entirely different website to subscribe to e-mail updates. It’s also better to have that subscribe/unsubscribe form in a visible location on every page instead of just having a little link that says "Get the email sitting up near the top of the page next to the archive. Maybe now I'll get some e-mail subscribers 😀 . Either way, I really like this whole layout better than anything I had with third-party services. I only hope my readers enjoy it as much as I do.

I replaced my link to a page containing Feedburner's email subscription form with the direct link. It doesn’t conform to my theme, but since the form opened Feedburner's window to present the captcha verification, I thought it would be better to have the email address textbox in the same place. It just looks a bit cleaner and allows for one less click and page load during the subscription process.

It's the last piece of the puzzle, and the single thing I missed from Posterous. Readers of The Kyle File can now subscribe via email to my feed, thanks to Google’s Feedburner. I have placed the link immediately below the Get the feed link at the bottom of my left sidebar. If I did this right, anyone who subscribes to my emails will receive a single message once every day that I post. It looks like you can also click Get the feed and you'll see a link to have The Kyle File delivered to your email along with several other options for receiving the feed. If you have any problems or suggestions regarding this feature, let me know in the comments section below.