On Subscribing

Subscribing to the GoodNewsLetter is really very simple. The recommended (and, from my personal point-of-view, the best) way is through the RSS feed. The link, www.staidan.org/Newsletter/rss.xml, is also available from the web page.

For those who prefer to have it delivered directly to their in-box, it is also available through membership in the NAM GoodNewsLetter group, at http://groups.google.com/group/nam-goodnewsletter (click on the link and follow the instructions to subscribe).

For those who wish more information, the following may be helpful.

Subscribing via RSS

Consider the "push" metaphor applied to e-mail: Someone is trying to "push" a document to you. The reason may be that this is someone you are in regular correspondance with, or it may be someone you would rather not be in correspondance with (better known as SPAM). Or, it could be someone you have requested to periodically send you documents. In this case, the "subscription" metaphor also applies.

To read email, you need something technically known as a mail reader. You may not know it as a mail reader: you may know it as Outlook, Evolution, Thunderbird, GMAIL, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, or anyone of a dozen other candidates. Technically, they are all mail readers. You launch it, it collects the 100 emails which have been sent to you since the last time you launched it, and you sort through 99 SPAMs to find the one useful note. Or, you set up spam filters, launch the program, find no mail waiting for you, and then you look through 100 spam messages looking for the one which was mis-lableled.

O.K., you know there are websites you like which regularly post new pages, or update existing ones. You would like to read the updates. Is there any way to find those updated pages, other than checking for them each day, or having the website mail you notifications which get lost in the SPAM?

For many sites, the good news is, that, yes there is. For this to work, two things are needed:

1) The website must have set up an RSS feed

2) You must have an RSS Reader which is subscribed to that feed

When you have an RSS reader subscribed to a feed, all you do is launch your RSS reader. If there is anything new, you are notified, just as you are with new e-mails. If you then choose to, you may read the updated documents. There is no spam, because, you are fetching the document; the website is not sending anything to you. The website never knows your email address, because, email never comes into the picture.

But, the whole process is as easy as using e-mail. In fact, your e-mail program may already be an RSS reader. Thunderbird (the e-mail analog to Firefox) has built in RSS support. Just click "Set up a new account", select "RSS Feeds and Blogs" and you are ready to subscribe. Click "manage subscriptions", then the "add" button and enter the URL for the RSS Feed in the box which appears and you are ready to read. Outlook 2007 and the Mac OS X email client work similarly.

If you are running WinDoze (a pity) and you don't have Outlook 2007 (understandable) and you don't want to pay to upgrade (good choice) and you don't want to replace whatever version of Outlook you use with Thunderbird (a mistake, in my opinion) finding an RSS reader is still easy. If your ISP has made some version of Yahoo or MSN your home page, and you still have Yahoo or MSN as your home page (or you made Google your home page) you already have an RSS reader in front of you. All of those news sections, with '+' signs in front, are actually picked up from RSS feeds. To add one of your own (on iGoogle), just click 'Add stuff', followed by the Add RSS feed link in the lower left column. A box will pop up. Enter the URL you want (www.staidan.com/Newsletter/rss.xml) and click the 'Add' button. When you close the box and go back to iGoogle, you will find a new box just for the GoodNewsLetter.

If you like Gmail or Yahoo Mail, and want a dedicated web oriented RSS Reader, then Google Reader is for you. Go to http://www.google.com/reader/ and follow the instructions to add RSS feeds.

Subscribe Via Google Groups

The NAM GoodNewsLetter Google Group is what is most commonly known today as a discussion group. Typically, when you join a discussion group, new postings in the group are e-mailed to you . You can then participate in the discussion by e-mailing a response to the group -- or, you can start a new discussion thread.

In keeping with Anglican Tradition, the NAM group has been configured to remove all the fun. The NAM group is a Moderated Group, which means that all postings must be approved by the moderator before they are forwarded to the members of the group. I am the moderator, and I can state that no postings will be forwarded -- with one exception: Each month the monthly edition of the newsletter will be posted to the group, and every member will have it forwarded to them.

If you prefer this subscription method, go to groups.google.com/group/nam-goodnewsletter and follow the directions.

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