To get the most out of your investment in Cerb4 you really should be informed of the latest project news: tips & tricks, docs, updates, security announcements, etc.  We’re constantly looking for the best ways to inform and engage the community.

We’ve been using the blog and Twitter as our primary channels for real-time project updates.  Lately we’ve been asked a lot of questions that were already covered recently on the blog; and while we have no problem sending links to these resources when people write in, the reason this happens probably has a lot to do with RSS feeds.

RSS is a great way to receive real-time updates.  As an entrepreneur and developer I have separate RSS readers running for real-time biz notifications (NetNewsWire) and blogs I read (Google Reader).  If I used the same news reader for both then I’d be training myself to ignore new RSS content, because most blog posts aren’t something that warrant interrupting myself constantly throughout the day.

My desktop RSS reader for real-time notifications has feeds for:

• Notifications from our helpdesk (ticket/task assignments, new comments/notes)
• Recent wiki edits
• New forum topics
• New blog comments
• New bugs/wishlist items
• Google Blog Search for ‘cerb4′ keywords
• Twitter search for ‘cerb4′ keywords

My Google Reader has several hundred blogs which I skim for interesting content when I have time.

This works for me, and I find RSS to be a much better way to keep an eye on our company activity while I work; but I realize that people who aren’t already using RSS this way will find it rather annoying to start doing *just* for our blog updates.  Most people appear far more comfortable using traditional e-mail notifications than RSS or Twitter.

To bridge the gap, we’ve added the ability to receive an e-mail update every time we post to the blog.  Over on the right you’ll see a new option that looks like this:

Add your e-mail address if you’d like to receive an update in e-mail when we post new content to the blog.  You can see from the history on the right that the blog is where we concentrate the most important project news.  This mailing list is maintained by Google FeedBurner (who handles our RSS) and the information won’t be used for any other purpose.  The updates are sent automatically when we post.

Thanks!
-Jeff@WGM