Subscription Differences
Email and RSS Feeds are two different ways to get updates from All Things Southern. Often a site offering both will provide the same to both, but it's not a requirement.
Is there a difference between subscribing to our email mailing list and subscribing to the RSS feeds?
Yes, they're two completely different things, and what they each contain is up to the provider. Email mailing lists are exactly that, content that is periodically delivered to your inbox by your having subscribed to the mailing. What's in that email is up to the creator of that list.
In our case, the All Things Southern weekly newsletter is crafted to contain intros to the articles published the prior week, an article from the archives, my comments for the week and a few other things.
So, basically what you get in email is whatever I happen to choose to put in email each week. I happened to have a fairly standard format so you know what you're getting, and can pretty much count on that each week. There's no requirement that it be related to anything else at all.
As a side effect of how our site is constructed, the act of posting our articles as an online archive also makes it available via RSS. That means that using an RSS reader you can retrieve and read all of the All Things Southern articles at your convenience.
In this case the newsletter feed includes the same newsletter that was posted on the website. This is actually fairly typical for many web sites - RSS feeds represent the content that was posted on the site. It's not necessarily so, once again it's up to the owner of the site what to place in an RSS feed.
When you subscribe to the individual item feeds, that's exactly what you'll get. The first part of each item, with a link back to the site for the entire article.
It's all about choices
So the bottom line is that not only are RSS and Email completely different delivery mechanisms, they're frequently completely different content.
The site owner who provides email and RSS has total control over what goes into each. They may be similar, they may be partly related, or they may have nothing to do with each other whatsoever.
And you, as well, have choices to make. After examining what content is made in which form, you'll then also want to choose which you want, and in what format you're most comfortable receiving it.
Email and RSS Feeds are two different ways to get updates from All Things Southern. Often a site offering both will provide the same to both, but it's not a requirement.
Is there a difference between subscribing to our email mailing list and subscribing to the RSS feeds?
Yes, they're two completely different things, and what they each contain is up to the provider. Email mailing lists are exactly that, content that is periodically delivered to your inbox by your having subscribed to the mailing. What's in that email is up to the creator of that list.
In our case, the All Things Southern weekly newsletter is crafted to contain intros to the articles published the prior week, an article from the archives, my comments for the week and a few other things.
So, basically what you get in email is whatever I happen to choose to put in email each week. I happened to have a fairly standard format so you know what you're getting, and can pretty much count on that each week. There's no requirement that it be related to anything else at all.
As a side effect of how our site is constructed, the act of posting our articles as an online archive also makes it available via RSS. That means that using an RSS reader you can retrieve and read all of the All Things Southern articles at your convenience.
In this case the newsletter feed includes the same newsletter that was posted on the website. This is actually fairly typical for many web sites - RSS feeds represent the content that was posted on the site. It's not necessarily so, once again it's up to the owner of the site what to place in an RSS feed.
When you subscribe to the individual item feeds, that's exactly what you'll get. The first part of each item, with a link back to the site for the entire article.
It's all about choices
So the bottom line is that not only are RSS and Email completely different delivery mechanisms, they're frequently completely different content.
The site owner who provides email and RSS has total control over what goes into each. They may be similar, they may be partly related, or they may have nothing to do with each other whatsoever.
And you, as well, have choices to make. After examining what content is made in which form, you'll then also want to choose which you want, and in what format you're most comfortable receiving it.
