Blogtrottr Turns RSS Feeds Into Email News Letters & Lets Your Filter Stories
We’re all pretty much familiar with RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and there a ton of services and apps that provide RSS syndication to let you keep up with your favorite sites. Though there are situations when using a traditional RSS reader just isn’t ideal and an email subscription sounds like a better option. Blogtrottr is one such handy online service that allows you to subscribe via RSS and have those feeds delivered to you by email either in real-time or on a set schedule, for example 2 hours, 6 hours or 12 hours. It quickly churns out an email digest from your subscribed blogs, sites etc., and delivers them as one unified newsletter.
Getting started with Blogtrott is pretty quick and hassle free actually. Just visit the website, enter the feed URL of the site you want to subscribe to, the email address where you want updates sent to and the delivery schedule. You will be asked for a confirmation over email after which you can start receiving blog feeds.
If you want more flexibility and control, however, then creating a Blogtrottr account is recommended. You can sign up by visiting the “Plans and Pricing” page and selecting the plan you wish to use. When signing up using the previously mentioned steps, the free plan is setup by default but can be changed any time you want. Besides Free, Blogtrottr offers Lite and Full paid plans both of which offer additional perks for a monthly or yearly fee.
In most cases, BlogTrottr automatically detects the feed URL, however there maybe a occasions when you need to manually enter the correct feed URL. Furthermore, sometimes a URL may contain multiple feed sources and Blogtrottr enables you to select one you wish to subscribe. You can add as many RSS feeds as you wish to your BlogTrottr account in a similar fashion.
After subscribing to your desired feeds, you can also manage them and configure settings within your account. From the main dashboard, you can choose to remove feeds, add new ones as well as activate and deactivate existing feeds on the fly.
By default feeds will be delivered on a daily schedule, but for a few blogs, this option may not work, and in that case you may need to independently configure each feed to update at different times of the day. To change the current schedule you can click an item from the list and configure further settings on a separate page.
You can specify email subject, for instance, or change URL, description and title if you have subscribed for the paid plan. Blogtrottr also lets you set custom filters for a feed which can help you receive emails only for a particular topic or subject. To do that, you can specify a new rule where you can add the rule type and topic name of your choice.
Overall, Blogtrottr is a handy solution for receiving RSS feeds directly to your inbox. Don’t forget to leave your comments with your thoughts on this below.
The author of this article and most Blogtrottr users may not have realized this, but Blogtrottr is an entirely unauthorized and copyright infringing service. I learned of its existence only when it showed up in my Web server logs as a major user of bandwidth and server resources. Blogtrottr does not ask for permission to redistribute content, does not share *any* of its revenues from distribution of bootleg copies of this content with the copyright holders (who in most cases are the authors of blog posts), and does not even provide nay instructions to “opt out” of having Blogtrottr republish and redistribute multiple copies of blog posts. (Not that republication without permission on an “opt-out” basis would comply with either US or UK copyright law, which requires permission on an “opt in” basis.) This unauthorized redistribution cannibalizes bloggers’ revenues by diverting readers from our Web pages (from which many bloggers earn revenues through advertising) to bootleg copies from which only Blogtrottr earns subscription revenues.