Wise Young
11-05-2001, 10:21 AM
Over the past few days, I have received a number of email messages from people asking how they can get a daily email digest of new postings on the forums.
This site has a powerful feature called Popit™ which allows you to subscribe to specific topics on the forums and be able to see the topics and replies on a custom page called MyPop. When you are inside a topic, on the top right and the bottom left on the message listing, you will find a PopIt! button. If you press that button, it will automatically enter that topic into your MyPop page preferences. In addition, in the MyPop page, you can edit the preferences so that it would send you email notification of if there are any new postings to to the topic and also send you a weekly email digest of all the postings in the topic.
We now have so many daily postings that a daily unedited email digest of postings would be 250-500 Kb in size. On any given day, there may be as many as 60-80 postings and some of them are rather long and may contain pictures. A weekly digest of all the postings would be several megabytes.
So, what I have been considering instead is to provide a weekly digest of the 10 most actively viewed topics on the forums. This will take quite a bit of work but I am considering this idea for two reasons. First, many people who are quadriplegic and have to use voice- or head-mouse navigation of the site find it too exhausting to go through all the forums and postings. Second, for many people who are overseas and may not have high-speed internet access to the site, coming to the site is prohibitively expensive and take too much time.
In addition to the email digest, I can put an html page on the carecure site which lists and ranks the 10 most popular topics of the week and provide active links to them.
What do people think?
This site has a powerful feature called Popit™ which allows you to subscribe to specific topics on the forums and be able to see the topics and replies on a custom page called MyPop. When you are inside a topic, on the top right and the bottom left on the message listing, you will find a PopIt! button. If you press that button, it will automatically enter that topic into your MyPop page preferences. In addition, in the MyPop page, you can edit the preferences so that it would send you email notification of if there are any new postings to to the topic and also send you a weekly email digest of all the postings in the topic.
We now have so many daily postings that a daily unedited email digest of postings would be 250-500 Kb in size. On any given day, there may be as many as 60-80 postings and some of them are rather long and may contain pictures. A weekly digest of all the postings would be several megabytes.
So, what I have been considering instead is to provide a weekly digest of the 10 most actively viewed topics on the forums. This will take quite a bit of work but I am considering this idea for two reasons. First, many people who are quadriplegic and have to use voice- or head-mouse navigation of the site find it too exhausting to go through all the forums and postings. Second, for many people who are overseas and may not have high-speed internet access to the site, coming to the site is prohibitively expensive and take too much time.
In addition to the email digest, I can put an html page on the carecure site which lists and ranks the 10 most popular topics of the week and provide active links to them.
What do people think?