How to: Quickly turn a feed into email alerts with RSSFwd
I love my mother-in-law. I love the way Barb approaches problems, taking the bull by the horns. I like how she seeks out information before making decisions.
Barb had expressed interest in more regular updates of medical news of conditions than I had been able to provide- Barb’s son has epilepsy, her husband has tinnitus, and she has a compulsion to tackle these challenges- so my “keeping an eye out” for medical news about these conditions really wasn’t enough.
Complicating the matter is the fact that Barb has no special love for computers. She’s pretty much got email down, though- so I hoped to build on that and avoid the need to get her started on an aggregator.
I started at Medworm and went to its Medical Conditions feed directory. For each medical condition listed, Medworm continually searches its approximately 2000 indexed feeds for references to the medical condition and returns articles about them via the feed.
From here, I copied down the URLs for the tinnitus and epilepsy feeds.
I wanted to turn these into email updates, but didn’t want to deal with setting them up in FeedBurner. After all, I was just setting up these email updates for one user. I decided to try out RssFWD. 
Setting up a feed to syndicate via email in RSSFwd really couldn’t be much easier.
First, enter the feed URL and click the “submit” button.
Next, enter in the email address of the person who wishes to receive the emailed updates and click the “Subscribe” button.
That’s it. The email recipient receives an email asking for confirmation and clicks on an included link.
If I was setting up a feed for use at our library, I’d probably do it through FeedBurner so I could track its use better, but for a quick one-off, you can’t beat the convenience of RSSFwd.
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August 29th, 2006 at 9:45 pm
Vry interestng. I’ll give that a try. Is it somehow better than R Mail? And FeedYes creates RSS feeds for URLs without them. Killer combo. Info galore via RSS.
September 18th, 2006 at 6:13 am
[...] To help demonstrate the usefulness of your library to management who don’t often have need for the clinical information you regularly provide, try making these feeds available via aggregator or email (try RSSFWD or FeedBurner) to the Director of Corporate Communications, PR Director, or other management who care a whole lot about public perception. [...]
September 27th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
[...] RSSFWD I’ve used RSSFWD a few times, found it quick and easy to use, and I think it is a great option when all you want to do is turn a feed into email updates one time for one person (I made another note on how this can be useful for “official news” current awareness here). For a few details on how to turn a feed into email updates with RSSFWD, see this post. [...]
May 20th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Thanks for the write up! We appreciate it and look out for many more features to come from RssFwd.com!
- Greg