How to Add Your Recent Blog Posts to Your Emails
April 6th, 2008 - Posted in Products, Web Strategies |I have been writing down ways to get your blog more traffic for an upcoming blog posts. I was looking around for tools that allowed a blog author to add their most recent blog posts to the signature of their emails. I could not find any so I wrote up a little script that does it. It is a Thunderbird extension, so if you use outlook, you will have to keep searching.
Thunderbird is a free email client built by the guys that brought you Firefox, and like Firefox, you can build extensions for it easily.
Let’s get to it.
Download the extension here: blogpoststosig2@matt.dunlap.xpi
Then in Thunderbird, go to Tools > add-ons and click install. This will open a file browser…find my extension and install it. Thunderbird will restart automatically.
After Thunderbird restarts, go to tools > add-ons again and click on options for the extension. You need to specify your blog feed.
Your done. Next time you go to write an email, in Tools, you will see
Below is my email signature with my 5 most recent blog posts
Pretty simple with lots of room for improvement. Feel free to take the code and extend. I would like to extend it to automatically find the email signature and insert the recent blog posts automatically. Any other suggestions are welcome.
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[…] How to Add Your Recent Blog Posts to Your Emails A simple method for displaying your most recent blog posts as part of a signature while using Thunderbird as your email client. Uses a Thunderbird extension to do the work. […]
[…] Matt Dunlap built a tool that adds your latest blog posts to your signature… However it only works in Thunderbird (no outlooks or web-based email client support!). […]
I have installed it and entered the feed address but get ‘nothing in feed’. Is there a particular feed format this app needs? I tried my feedburner feed address but it did not work =(
Hi Lisa,
I’ll look into it. I get the same thing when trying my feedburner feed. I use my wordpress default feed. http://realespace.com/wp-feed.php
update, your feedburner feed is probably an atom feed. This only works on rss feeds
Wow, that would be against the very reason, why my friends suggested and helped to create my blog… To stop bombarding them with my “masterpieces” over the email…LOL
Then don’t use it
I am “bombarding” them anyway….like BTW, did you read my latest post?? It works as well, I am not much skilled on PC …
But I am glad to join the party…thanks Matt
Tomas
I feel that placing your most recent blog post titles in the email signature is unobtrusive since it is at the very end of your email.
As far as bombarding friends…most your friends should already be getting notified by your blog posts thru twitter, delicious, technorati, etc… I will only include the blog posts in my email to people that are not in my social group.
Also, a blog is relatively passive, while email is pro-active… a good e-newsletter is still much more effective then blogging.
Like I said, I have a long way to learn about all this…
Thanks again
Matt,
What a great idea. I’m recommending this to a number of my clients. Great job! Thanks for sharing.
Hi Matt,
This sounds like a great idea! I have a Firefox extension that inserts signatures in Gmail, and adding a blog post to it instead of a static signature is an excellent idea.
There are people who are requesting that you make your plug-in compatible with Gmail as a firefox extension. You’re welcome to download the Firefox extension from my site and add this support. All I ask is that you just link back to me.
Let me know if you have any questions.
James
Firefox is saying that ‘blog posts to sig 1.0 could not be installed because it is not compatible with firefox’
Is there anyway to automate this, so I don’t have to keep on clicking on “insert new posts” from the tools menu?
I keep getting an error.