Jalaj P. Jha

I read a lot of blogs using Google Reader which serves me about 100 posts daily from over 40 blogs. I have also subscribed to a couple of blogs to be delivered by email. Getting RSS feed by email is a good thing for reading offline but individual mails for each blog keeps me away from subscribing too many feeds. And yes many of the blogs do not offer email subscription, which takes only registering the blog with feedburner, but shouldn’t blame anyone as this blog too didnot offer any till recently. I wish if I could a single daily mail for all blogs I want to subscribe thus enabling me to read them all in one go… Suddently Genie appeared and my wish came true… Yes there is a way, using Google Reader and Feedburner… Read ahead.

The way I am talking here about, requires you to create your own feed by compiling all feeds that you need to read daily and then registering this feed with Feedburner to get the daily mails. The task of creating the compiled feed will be accomplished using Google Reader. How? Let’s get on to it.

First of all you will require to subscribe all feeds on the Google Reader and needless to say that you need a Google account for it. If you need to go for a seperate account then it’s OK but if you can help it, a common account for feeds you want to read on mail and others that you read online can also do.

Now Click on “Manage Subscriptions” to go to Subscription Settings Page. All subscribed feeds would be visible there. Against one of the feeds you wish to get on mail, click on “Add to a folder” (or “Change Folders”) button, then “New Folder…” Option and give a name for new folder/tag, say “GetByEmail” and press OK

Now select all the other feeds, which you want to get by mail, using the checkbox to the left of each of them. Select “GetByEmail” under “Add Tag” section in the drop down list “More Actions…”

Once you get the status message “Saved changes” move to the “Tags’ settings page.

Besides the newly created tag “GetByEmail” you can see a “broadcasting” icon, with “Private” written by the side. Click on this icon to make the tag public.

As soon as you have done it a few links will appear to the right with one of them being “view public page”. Click on this link to open the page that’s now available publicly.

This page lists all latest posts from all feeds that you needed to get email for. Check the sidebar on the right, you will find that there is a link to a RSS feed for all these shared items. Write click on the feed link/icon and copy the url of the feed thus made available.

That’s all that we needed Google Reader for. Now login to your Feedburner account. Create if you don’t have one. Goto “My Feeds” page, link available on the top of the page. On this page there is a form where you can paste the Rss feed url that you just copied and click on “Next”.

On the next page give a title for your feed compilation and a feed address and press “Activate Feed”

Once you have activated your feed, look for the ‘Skip directly to feed management” link on the bottom of the page. On the page that opens, click on “Publicize” and on the next page click on “Email Subscriptions’ on the sidebar on left. On the page that opens up there would be an ‘Activate” button, clicking which will activate the feed.

On the next page a block of code will appear which you can paste to your website (if you own, otherwise don’t worry and read ahead). There is a page url in this code that looks like something below. Copy this section of url and paste in browser’s address bar to open the page.

An email subscription form will appear, put in your email address where you want to receive the consolidated mail, type in the letter appearing on the image and submit. Once you have done that an activation mail would be sent to your email address, clicking the activation link will start your mail subscription sending you daily consolidated mails.

That’s all folks and if you ever find that you want to discontinue reading one or more of of the blogs or want to add new feeds to it.. just log in to Google Reader and Remove the “GetByEmail” tag from the feed (for discontinuing a feed) or subscribe to a feed (if you have not already done it) and add “Get ByEmail” tag to the feed (to add a new feed) and the result feed will be appropriately modified.