The Benefits of Subscribing to Blogs

Earlier this week I posted an announcement about moving my RSS delivery service from FeedBurner to FeedBlitz. This is probably a good time take a look at the benefits of subscribing to blogs compared to simply bookmarking them and visiting them on a regular basis.

Subscription Options and Their Benefits
Most blogs have at least two methods of subscribing to updates; RSS and email. Subscribing via RSS through a reader app like Feedly or Flipboard will put the latest updates on that app in near real-time. In both of those RSS reader apps you can create categories of feeds from your favorite blogs and read them all in one place. Feedly and Flipboard don't display advertising next to articles while you're reading.

Subscribing via email will send you an email when new content is posted on a blog. In many cases you can read the full blog entry without leaving your email client. The emails from Free Technology for Teachers come out once a day and include all of the posts from the previous 24 hour period. In the emails that come from this blog, advertising has been removed too (there was a small glitch with that earlier this week, but it have been fixed).

Why not just follow a blog through social media?
I know folks who have abandoned RSS and email subscriptions all together in favor of just relying on social media updates. I haven't taken that plunge yet because social media updates move faster than I can keep up.

Options for subscribing to this blog
RSS feed
Email subscription
Twitter (I put personal updates in this as well as ed tech updates)
Google+ (I share everything from blog posts to interesting pictures that I find)