Why start a blog?

So, I've never really been big on blogs. In fact, I really like this shirt, but lately I've come to realize how blogs can be a really handy way of getting a message out. It's not as invasive as email and it can actually be better at getting a message across. Plus, you can easily archive the posts, making them available for future readers. Don't get me wrong, I'll still send out the occasional email, but posting a quick news item here is much, much easier than sending out an email to 10,000+ addresses. Mailing on that scale has its own special headaches.

So, that brings me to the WunderCounter blog. I wanted a quick way to get little news bits out to folks. I do like to post items on the dashboard page so that people see them when they log in, but I've found that some people either don't see the notes or find them easy to ignore. I'll continue to post important messages on the dashboard, but the dashboard doesn't allow you to comment back, so that's another thing the blog has going for it.

I think what really brought me around is the fact that in the latest Mac OS (10.5), RSS feeds are built in to Mail. I've found it to be ridiculously easy to add a few blogs to that section of Mail and the layout, which is a lot like a regular email message, gives me an easy way to get a quick overview of new posts on blogs that I care about. I believe Outlook has something similar built in, but since I'm not a Windows guy, I can't really comment on that. If you're using the latest version of Mail, just select File -> Add RSS feeds and specify the custom URL of the blog feed you're interested in. Hopefully you'll choose to follow this WunderCounter blog and you'll pick up some helpful information along the way!