Yesterday I was trying to make it easier for people to subscribe to War News Radio‘s podcast, so I turned on Feedburner’s service which allows people to subscribe to the RSS feed via e-mail. Unfortunately, I realized today that Feedburner sends out e-mails daily (with no option to change the frequency of e-mails), and that you can’t control how many posts are sent at a time. We only publish one show every Friday, so there is no need to e-mail people about our last 10 shows every day. This is a really stupid and useless service, and they don’t even have a pro version with more functionality.

So I went looking for competing services, and I found plenty. The problem is that there are too many, and I can’t choose between all of them! Here are a few I am considering:

* FeedBlitz – Everyone agrees that it’s butt ugly and horrible, but for some reason massive numbers of people use it.
* Squeet – Also kind of ugly, and apparently doesn’t let you see the e-mail addresses of your subscribers, which is a win for privacy but a loss for functionality/convenience.
* Yutter – Looks simple and relatively pretty, but their blog seems a bit unprofessional, and they seem like such a small operation that they may very well disappear.
* Zookoda – Apparently very full-featured and customizable, but apparently a pain to set up. Also, I’m not sure whether the people who subscribe using it will show up properly in my Feedburner stats… FeedBlitz and Squeet are FeedBurner partners so they show up fine, and Yutter claims it will be counted in FeedBurner stats… Zoodoka doesn’t say one way or another in their FAQ.

Where the @#$% is a comparison chart when I need one? Comparison charts are really indispensable for making up one’s mind in situations with too many choices.

What should I do, folks? I’m seriously hyperventilating here.

UPDATE: As Asheesh points out, all of the above services are proprietary, and a self-hosted open source solution would be superior. What I really want is a WordPress Email Notification Plugin, but unfortunately the existing one is out of date / abandoned looked out of date/abandoned. There are rumors of an updated version being in development, and I would be willing to donate to such a worthy cause if it is in fact in progress. I’ve e-mailed them, we’ll see if they respond.

UPDATE 2: The people responsible for the plugin wrote back and said:

Nelson,

This is still active and we’ve not had any issues running the latest release on WP 2.0. If you know of any specific issues, please let me know.

Also, yes, donations would be extremely helpful in order to free up our time. (See: http://blog.watershedstudio.com/2006/03/anouncement-wordpress-email-notification-plugin-v30-development/ ) If everyone that used it donated a few dollars we’d be golden, but I believe that we have a grand total of $7 in the v3.0 development jar to date.

If you have any questions feel free to let me know.

Brian

I think I will put a little money in the pot… if this is something you might use, you should too ^_^