Introducing Subscriptions
Keep track of posts across multiple blogs with the subscriptions reader.
Do you have trouble keeping track of all the blogs you read each morning? You may use RSS feeds to keep track, but those can be tricky to manage for a non-technical person. You may also open multiple tabs and scan through every blog, but that becomes difficult with a large number of blogs to read. Let’s face it, keeping up to speed with multiple blogs is tougher than it should be.
To solve this, today we’re introducing a new subscriptions feature to WordPress.com. Subscriptions are an easy way to track and read posts across multiple blogs, all in once place.
How Subscriptions Work
Let’s say you’re reading a blog on WordPress.com that you really enjoy — so much so you want to be notified when new posts are published so you remember to read them. You can subscribe to this blog really easily by using the “Subscribe” menu in the admin bar. By going up to your admin bar, and clicking “Subscribe to blog”, you’ll be instantly subscribed and all current and future posts will be added to the subscriptions tab on your WordPress.com home screen.
The next time you visit WordPress.com, if new posts have been published on any of these blogs you’ll see a “NEW” notification on your admin bar. This lets you know that there are new posts for you to read. You can now use the “My Subscriptions” menu to quickly access your subscriptions reader and catch up on all the latest posts. You can also head straight to your subscriptions by using the new subscriptions tab on the WordPress.com home screen.
We’ve also brought email and jabber notifications all under one roof, so it’s easy to turn on email notifications of new posts, or get posts sent directly to you via instant messenger. Don’t worry, all of your existing email and jabber subscriptions have been ported through.
Subscriptions are live and ready for you to use. We’ve put together a subscriptions support page that will get you up to speed and show you how to get started.
- September 10, 2010
- Features
WordPress.com News 
google reader is fairly easy to use so I’m not sure what the point of this is. WordPress seems to roll out a lot of features like this that apply only to reading wordpress blogs. you should consider allowing subscription to any RSS feed within the wordpress tools. That would make it easier for me to read blogs within your site and easily comment on them or blog about them. But adding functionality to wordpress to facilitate my reading of other wordpress blogs is a bit strange. I don’t think wordpress is a community of blogs that all interact more than blogs on other platforms out there. WordPress is a tool for blogging, it should not favour other wordpress blogs in reading/subscription/connecting.
just my two cents.
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You can subscribe to any site that contains a feed, it is not limited to WordPress.com blogs.
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Hi,
Thank you for the useful tip.
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Excellent!! Thank you
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This could turn very useful if my blog could be the subscriber and then it could republish the subscription feed through a widget.
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Excellent. Blogging just became a little easier.
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Excellent development from WordPress! Thanks.
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I prefer, and love, blog surfer as well as tag surfer. They put everything at my fingertips. Blog surfer specially, it shows me how active the blog has been lately. But, I will give subscriptions a try, I guess. Good Idea!
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Great! Really useful.
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Add an import function and you have me. Apparently I’m im the market for a new aggregator after this: http://blog.ask.com/2010/09/bloglines-update.html
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Big thanks. I will try this new feature.
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If you blog a lot you use WordPress, right?
why would you then go to another app (google reader) to read other blogs?
surely you would stay in the same app unless it was rubbish?
well that’s what i think. and yes i have used netvibes and google reader
WordPress is great!
(It will rule the world when you let me post to Facebook fan pages however) 🙂
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This looks great.
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Google Reader, which is what I’ve been using, often has trouble images showing pictures from other blogs, or allowing you to watch videos or click through to certain things. I’m curious to try this–’bout time you added this option! 🙂
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This is much easier than taking the url and adding to the blog roll..
Thanks a lot !
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Yet, another innovative features by WordPress team. I just love this tool.
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Neat stuff… and easier to manage then RSS Feed Readers, I guess!
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That’s fantastic 😀
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This is an excellent resource. I like things that keep me organized.
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VERY nice implementation of something I’ve been looking for! For the folks questioning the value of this – it has a major benefit over Google Reader:
*You can subscribe to private WordPress blogs and read their posts through an aggregator*
I know you can get a single-click subscribe function for Google Reader but I think the WordPress one on the admin bar is easier, and handles subscribing/unsubscribing very intuitively, so I give that a plus, too.
Many folks I know have never heard of an RSS reader and don’t have a Google account (and don’t really wish to sign up for one). For those folks, this is definitely the way to go. Once you guys get in support for comments (so I don’t have to subscribe to comments via email), this tool will totally rock.
I’ll be moving all my people-blog-reading out of Google Reader and into WordPress Subscriptions. Reader will still reign supreme for mass aggregation of my many “subscriptions” of collaborative blogs (tech or otherwise), webcomics, etc, but this will be a nice 2nd “launch pad” for me to check in on all my friends, family, and internet-neighbors who I’d prefer to give a little more personal attention to.
Also, if you want to make things a little more inclusive and community-oriented, it would be a good idea to add the following to this kind of service:
1) Add an option to notify the blog owner when someone subscribes to the blog
2) Provide a place where the owner can see which users are subscribed to the blog, so they can click through to that user’s blog and see if they’d like to subscribe in turn. This would be a great way for people with common interests to “link up” after they find each other through tag surfer, etc. (Of course you’d have to look out for spammers who subscribe in the hopes to get people to click through, but there are ways around this, including restricting subscriptions until approval of the blog owner is given, similar to Twitter’s “follow” functionality).
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so that’s why I’ve been double notified: by ordered RSS subscribtion and unwanted e-mails…
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You can turn off the email subscription from subscribe.wordpress.com or the subscription tab on WordPress.com home page. You can also completely block subscription emails from the settings page.
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Did you have to restrict the email notifications to WordPress only?
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It will be more easy if you’re on the same portal, anyway THANKS A LOT!
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Another Excellent vote! Thank you so much.
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This is Cool. Its like WordPress.com Admins never rest until they get the best out for us Bloggers.
Keep it Up.
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This was not great.. This was given for those who have registered with WP. If outside people wants to subscribe for my blog.. Then???????????
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They can subscribe to your feed (http://website.wordpress.com/feed/) or you could add the Email Subscription widget to your sidebar so that they can subscribe via email.
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This is going to be quite useful! Thank you for the new stuff!
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What a great idea, very pleased to see people thinking like you do. WordPress.com is the best.
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Love it! Now what if my reading public has not heard of this? Or I would get someone not WordPress savvy!
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How can I import my feeds from google reader to wp subscriptions?
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Import feature is not available at the moment, but you can add any RSS feed from Manage Blog Subscriptions tab.
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Great Idea. I have been trying to watch other bloggers – those who also have been writing positive minded blogs – but have lost several sites (Forgetfulness disease) because they don’t write frequently. This will keep me up to date on their new posts.
Thanks again for innovations…
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Very timely. Bloglines is shutting down on October 1st, and I’ve been dithering about where to take my growing list of blogs; Google reader is unwieldy, Netvibes is messy, and RSS subscriptions are a pain in the proverbial, so I was really happy to see that you are now offering this service. Thanks, guys!
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I hope you’ll port the email subscription option over to WordPress.org. The .com version is superior to plug-ins available for .org.
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Very handy! Thank you, Andy! I like this much better than the surfing thing… God Bless!
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Yeah really useful…
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