Listing badly

I am hopeful that my colleagues and associates will read this blog and ask questions, offer constructive comments, and let me know when I might be heading in the wrong direction.

To better engage everyone, I did some research about how I might get the Blogger site to send automatic email notifications whenever I add a new post or when someone comments on an existing post.  Seems simple enough, but it requires a little creative configuration of blogger and setting up a related email list.

It’s fairly easy to get Blogger to send such notices to a single email address.  It’s an option under SETTINGS > MOBILE AND EMAIL.  There is a place to insert an email address for  “Comment Notification Email” and a separate place for “Email posts to” – the latter generating an email with the full text of each new post and the former generating a notification when anyone adds a comment.

The problem with this is that Blogger allows no more than ten email addresses to be inserted.  This is fine for a small discussion group but not for an entire class list.

So, what to do?  My solution was to create an automatic mailing list outside of blogger using the list server software available from the provider of my personal domain.   One could also create a Google Group (or Yahoo group) comprised of all the email addresses of the blog members.  Then, have Blogger send notifications to the single email address for the list server or Google Group and let that be the point of distribution to all the blog members.

Because most list servers and web groups require that members confirm that they want to be part of the group, it’s not possible to just add people to the list without their consent and acknowledgement.  When you add an email address, the addressee will receive a message requesting acceptance of being subscribed to the list.

And, of course, subscribers can elect to unsubscribe at any time, usually by sending an unsubscribe message to the administrative address of the list.