Distributing blogs via PDF, e-mail

Posted on Sunday, August 7, 2005 by Rex Hammock

Distributing blogs via PDF, e-mail: Last week, I first heard about this site, rss2pdf.com, that converts RSS or OPML feeds into a PDF file.

At that time, I could only think of reasons I’d never need it, but I bookmarked it for when I had a few minutes to try it out, which I just did.

I still can’t think how I’d use it, but I know people who have someone print their e-mail out for them who might find it useful (or, at least their administrative assistants might). Does anyone know of a service similar to this that could convert a set number of blog posts into an html/e-mail format? I can see how that might be helpful to those who want to subscribe to a blog via a daily or weekly or other regular recurring form of e-mail rather than an RSS feed. (Yes, I’ve heard those people exist.) I think that many blogging platforms offer the optioin of receiving individual posts via e-mail – Userland’s Manila — the platform I use via via Userland’s hosting service, allows that. What I’m envisioning, however, is more like rss2pdf.com, except the RSS feed flows into a pre-designed e-mail template. Maybe the folks who have registered the domain, rss2email.com are working on something like that.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

About Rex Hammock

Founder/ceo of Hammock Inc., the content marketing and custom media services company based in Nashville, Tenn.
This entry was posted in All other, blogging and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.
  • nospamstilwebm@yahoo.com

    It should be easy to use MagpieRSS (used on http://news.smallbusiness.com) combined with some existing PHP libraries (http://pear.php.net) to generate the email digests of RSS feeds. The trickier part would be creating the customization. If the levels of customization start simple, it shouldn’t be too hard to implement.

  • Tim Germer

    Along with this idea, I want NetNewsWire to run a script either in the morning or before I leave work that takes all the unread blog posts in a specified folder – for instance my personalities folder: Rex, that’s where you live :) and, using OS X’s Summarize Service, summarize each post and make an aggregated pdf, displaying the summaries and feeds like Winer’s River of News.

  • Shawn Lea

    I send a lot of e-mail to CEO types whose assistants filter (and sometimes print out) their e-mail. In my experience, they would not want a PDF file. They would want an e-mail. Too many of them try to forward the PDF and then it doesn’t work or open for some reason – they prefer text. (They just prefer their assistant to get it so he or she can decide if it’s important enough for them to read.) My point: I think the RSS to e-mail is enough for that subset.

  • Shawn Lea

    I send a lot of e-mail to CEO types whose assistants filter (and sometimes print out) their e-mail. In my experience, they would not want a PDF file. They would want an e-mail. Too many of them try to forward the PDF and then it doesn’t work or open for some reason – they prefer text. (They just prefer their assistant to get it so he or she can decide if it’s important enough for them to read.) My point: I think the RSS to e-mail is enough for that subset.

  • Uli

    Hi,

    with http://www.feed2mail.org you can send your feed to friends via email. No need to create a PDF before.

    Uli

  • Donny

    Your site is realy very interesting!