Dave Burke : Freelance .NET Web Developer specializing in Online Communities

I just posted on how I discovered FeedBlitz to add subscriptions to my blog by email.  Seems to be a great service and that adding email subscription support is probably a good idea.  Here's my CSBlogs sidebar FeedBlitz form (more like a formette, really), which takes the user to a simple FeedBlitz one-click confirmation page.

The simplest way to add FeedBlitz support to your CSBlog is to add a single hyperlink to the FeedBlitz subscriber confirmation where the user will enter their email address.  Subscription option details are listed at FeedBlitz once you register your feed.  The no-compile approach of adding a hyperlink with your FeedBlitz FeedID is still a clean process for the user, but I wanted a form on my blog.

The FeedBlitz form approach wraps the widget in FORM tags, so we .NET CSBloggers can't do a simple copy-n-paste.  I created a new Skin-EmailSubscribe.ascx control and added it to my Skin-blogSideBar.ascx control.  Nothing remarkable about the code, the OnClick() does a redirect to FeedBlitz containing your FeedID and the user's email address, just like the FeedBlitz widget.  Everything (what there is for this mod, which is very little) is in this TXT file.  Remember that if you use this code, be sure to change my FeedID of "15149" to your FeedBlitz FeedID--unless you want anyone using it to be subscribing to my blog instead of yours. J