If you’re a competitive sailor, you can’t get much better news than what you’ll get every day from Scuttlebutt. The problem is that it’s an email list, and if you get as much email as me, the last thing you need is one more email to read.
But one thing I do spend some time reading each day is my blog RSS feeds. I use Bloglines, a free online feed reader. Recently I discovered a great feature in Bloglines where you can get a custom email address to turn periodic email lists into feeds in your bloglines account.
Instructions below the jump…
- Click the “Add” link under the “My Feeds” tab in the sidebar to open up the “Subscribe” page in the main frame.
- Click the “Email Groups” link to add a new email group.
- From here you can add Yahoo or Google Groups lists directly, or you can click the “Create an Email Subscription” link to add a custom list. For Scuttlebutt, click this link.
- Bloglines will create a new subscription based on a custom email address. From here you can also change the name of the subscription and the folder it shows up in. Save that email address for later and click the “Create Email Subscription” button.
- You’re supposed to just be able to subscribe to the email list using the custom email address directly, but that didn’t work for me with Scuttlebutt. So I ended up setting up GMail to automatically forward Scuttlebutt mails to the Bloglines email address. You should be able to do the same with other mail clients.
Enjoy!
Update: If you didn’t know it already, Scuttlebutt also has a more “casual” blog called the Scuttleblog.
Tags: bloggage, gmail, tips-tricks
6 comments
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February 8, 2006 at 11:25 pm
James Byers
Awesome. I had to stop reading the ‘butt because it clogged up my already-clogged inbox. But it’s a drop in the bucket compared to a few hundred rss feeds.
February 9, 2006 at 8:14 am
Bryon Thornburgh
Scuttlebutt has an RSS feed: http://www.sailingscuttlebutt.com/rss/index.xml
February 9, 2006 at 8:56 am
chris
Yes, the ‘butt does have an RSS feed, but it doesn’t include the actual content of the newsletter. Its fine if you just want to be notified when a new issue comes out, but I don’t read blogs that don’t publish content via RSS. Its just extra work.
March 15, 2006 at 2:19 pm
Craig Leweck
Always cool to read about Scuttlebutt on other people’s blogs. I just signed up for a Bloglines subscription to Scuttlebutt, so I can find out how it works. I am thinking that it didn’t work for you, as whenever you subscribe to Scuttlebutt, you have to be able to reply to the confirmation email. With the Bloglines email address, there is no place for that to go to, so you weren’t able to confirm your Scuttlebutt subscritpion. Anyway, I will give it a go and see how it works. Thanks for the tips. - Craig Leweck, Publisher, Scuttlebutt
March 15, 2006 at 7:33 pm
Craig Leweck
Just checked my Bloglines subscription. It worked fine, but I don’t like it as much as my SharpReader. On Bloglines, you lose the look of the site, and the navigation that you might want to access. Plus, the punctuation does not always transfer well. On SharpReader, you click on the link, and you can read it straight from the Scuttlebutt website, but it is within the reader’s frame.
Probably the advantage of Bloglines is that you can use it for any email subscription format. But since Scuttlebutt is already doing an RSS feed, I am not sure there is a reason to go there. Ideally, Scuttlebutt would put an RSS tag to each story. But since we come out once a day, and since tagging is a chore, we compromised and are tagging each issue.
We do get requests for a version for Blackberrys/Treos. Any ideas?
March 15, 2006 at 7:33 pm
Craig Leweck
Just checked my Bloglines subscription. It worked fine, but I don’t like it as much as my SharpReader. On Bloglines, you lose the look of the site, and the navigation that you might want to access. Plus, the punctuation does not always transfer well. On SharpReader, you click on the link, and you can read it straight from the Scuttlebutt website, but it is within the reader’s frame.
Probably the advantage of Bloglines is that you can use it for any email subscription format. But since Scuttlebutt is already doing an RSS feed, I am not sure there is a reason to go there. Ideally, Scuttlebutt would put an RSS tag to each story. But since we come out once a day, and since tagging is a chore, we compromised and are tagging each issue.
We do get requests for a version for Blackberrys/Treos. Any ideas?