Email Alerts

Unfortunately, not all sites that you want to track have RSS capabilities. However, this doesn't mean that you have to do all the work yourself :) Email alerts are another great tool you should take advantage of to save you time and effort.

Email alerts

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Email alerts are away to be updated on the changes to a site. They work automatically and then send the findings to your email. There are two different ways to utilize email alerts:

Site Based Email Alerts

Would be used for sites that don't have RSS feeds. You can find a specific site that you want trough Google, that has an email alert service, and then have it sent to your email.

Search Based Email Alerts

Some information that you would want to track can't be found on one site. You can search a general Email Alert search tool, such as Google Alerts, in order to find sources related to your search, which the search tools will then provide email alerts that go to your inbox.

To here more details about email alerts, read my blog entry.

Email filtering

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The downside of email alerts is that they can really bog down your mail box if you don't manage them or have very specific searches. Email filtering is how you can have the email alerts sent to a specific folder in you Gmail account in order to simplify your results.

Presentation Elements:

Email Alerts and Disney

I get my Email Alerts from Google Alert. They come on a weekly basis. They search for "disney pictures" but not "disneyland" or "Disneyworld". It hasn't really proven to be that useful. The occasional site that they found is useful, for example, this December 6th email alert:

Washington Post - Disney to Make a Sequel to Bolt

I really like how Google Alert really reduces the email alerts - I pretty much on get around 1-10 per email. For the most part though, the alerts have been pretty useless. Another part of it is that I strongly prefer checking RSS feeds to checking my email.

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