Even More Ways to Enjoy Paulgarrigan.com
When I started Paulgarrigan.com last June I didn’t have any real plan for it. The idea was to just take some of my other content that was spread around the web and locate it in one area; my main focus was going to be addiction and recovery. In the last few months the website has taken on a life of its own and I’m posting about five new articles (as well as audio and video content) a week on different topics. I’m delighted with the way things have worked out, but realise that not everyone is going to be interested in all the subjects I cover. Some visitors might only want to read my living in Thailand related articles, and have no interest in my posts about addiction, meditation, or Buddhism.
I did consider breaking the website up into different blogs again, but I’m reluctant to do this. Instead I’ve been trying to create different zones on the website (Buddhism Zone, Recovery Corner, and Teaching in Thailand). I know that many of my readers subscribe via an RSS feed so what I propose is that you subscribe to the feed that most interests you; that way you will only get content related to this topic. If you look on the right hand sidebar you will now see a subscribe to feeds option with 4 possibilities-
- ‘I Want it All’ is the original feedburner RSS feed that will deliver all the new posts on Paulgarrigan.com
- The ‘Addiction and Recovery’ RSS feed will only deliver those posts related to addiction and recovery
- ‘Just Thailand Related’ is probably self-explanatory
- ‘Meditation and Buddhism’ will be one to avoid if you have no interest in the spiritual
Sometimes my posts touch on more than one of these issues so don’t be surprised if the same post ends up in different feeds – I can’t see any way around this. We will give this shot anyway to see what happens. Thanks to Catherine over at Women Learning Thai for suggesting the idea.
I’m serious about making this website the best it can be. If you have any suggestions please leave a comment below.
Update I have now also added email subscriptions for different topics as well
in the US
in the UK
It looks great Paul. I found several plugins but so far hardcoding works fine.
I’m now in the search of a category specific email…
Catherine recently posted..Design Flaws of Nesting Thai Birds
Good luck with that Catherine; that is something I’ll leave to another day.
your stuff is always a good read
thanks
tom
Thank you Tom, I really appreciate your nice comment.
That’s a great idea Paul, I might look at implementing something like that on my blog.
Thanks for the inspiration.
Aaron recently posted..Guest Post- Prince Palace Hotel Bangkok review
Hi Aaron, it was actually Catherine from WLT who gave me the idea
Paul, good idea, but one small request, can you include email subscription please, I like to read stuff from my inbox
Mike recently posted..Thai Gold Baht
Paul oops sorry just seen the link lower down……..does email include everything?
Mike recently posted..Four Unique Bangkok Eating Experiences
Hi Mike, at the moment the email does include everything, but Catherine sent me an article about how to divide the emails into different categories as well. I’ll have a look at this later.
Hi Mike, the email option is now there.
In my search I’ve found out how to add the email subscription for individual sections.
1) Create a RSS feed in Feedburner for each category.
2) Combine the feeds in Yahoo pipes, create a RSS feed
3) Create a Feedburner RSS feed from the Yahoo pipes RSS
4) Add a Feedburner email subscription to the combined RSS
Note: when you create the first Feedburner RSS do not get fancy. Go with the default RSS and do not add any bells and whistles or it won’t work (it didn’t work for me).
By going through Feedburner you can keep track of who is subscribed to you via email and RSS (stats, yadda yadda). If you use another one, it should work too (I only have FB).
So far I’ve put the different email subscriptions on WLT.
- Entire site
- Learning Thai
- Living in Thailand
I’ll now add the different RSS feeds for the same.
Then, as they say in Thailand “up to you”… what you decide to sign up for.
Hi Catherine, I followed your advice and now we should have email subscriptions by topic. Thanks for that.
Looking good Paul! I’m still playing around with mine. It’s been a crazy day so I should settle eventually
Paul, how about adding a >links< section with categories roughly corresponding to your blog separations? I think a section would be good, sobriety obviously but maybe broken down more than that… we could collectively come up with a lot of web resources I suspect. Nice to see you still posting away… beats the heck out of hanging around in bars, no?
Hi Doug, breaking up the links would make a lot of sense. Leave it with me, and I’ll put it on my to do list.