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orange banner with the icon for RSS an the 3 letters: R.S.S.

I’m using WordPress for this blog because it’s easier than building the website from scratch.

Sending email notifications

There are a few plugins you can use to offer the option for readers to subscribe and be notified when I publish a new post.

But a lot of them are not working that well or a bit demanding to set up, or invasive, introducing cookies or else.

It’s not like I have a huge audience anyway ahahaha! So I just decided to simply do it myself. I don’t publish so many posts either so not a huge task to send an email and keep the subscribers’ list up-to-date.

RSS feed

This is another option which I added today. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It helps you stay up-to-date with blogs, websites and social media channels in one place.

It’s an aggregator. Instead of visiting many places, you subscribe to sites to receive notifications of new posts and read them in an RSS reader, like Feedly for example.

It wasn’t used that much anymore since it was created (1995!), but it’s making a come back.

You can learn more about What’s an RSS Feed? (And Where to Get It) on Lifewire.

To add this on WordPress, it’s pretty easy. The url you need to share is your blog url + feed. so for me: https://blog.chezleskrus.com/feed

If you try this, you’ll see some XML:

screenshot of part of the XML code for the feed for my blog

When you add this URL to your RSS reader, you’ll get something like this:

dashboard from Feedly, you can see the last two posts I published with a picture, their title, a little summary and option to bookmark, make it a favourite or mark as read.
Example on Feedly for my blog

You’ll get a notification when a new post is published. That’s it. No need to share your email address.

If you are not sure how to add this on your own WordPress blog, just add a ‘Custom HTML’ widget in the side bar with this code:

<a href="the-url-of-your-own-blog/feed"><img border="0" alt="" src="https://i.imgur.com/fZIDSoj.png" width="40" height="40" style="padding-right:10px"><strong>Subscribe to the RSS feed</strong></a>
screenshot of the side bard of my blog where you can subscribe to my blog either via email or RSS feed
The orange icon and the link next to it is the result of the code above

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