Things I Did Not Know About Alerts (Plus, Feeds Stuff)

Hi folks -- I've got some information about Alerts that may be useful to some people.

* Alerts Turning Themselves Off? As you might recall, last week, I blogged about how I wasn't getting my comment alerts.

Well, after a day or two, I finally wised up and went to my Alerts Settings Page, http://alerts.aol.com/ -- to check my settings.

Lo and behold: In the section under "Status", it said OFF when it should have said ON.

That was kind of odd. Anyway, I clicked the check box next to the name of the Alert and clicked the Turn On button. (Also, if you want to check or change your Alert delivery methods, click the pencil in the "Edit" column.)

Now, why did my comment Alerts turn off? Things usually don't happen spontaneously for no reason, so I asked the Alerts folks what could have caused this. Here is what they came back with:

"There is one process in the Alerts system that runs daily and can turn off your alert delivery IF you hit the Spam button when you open the alert e-mail with one of the AOL mail programs. If so, the Alerts process might turn off the alert delivery automatically."

As it happens, I think I actually did accidentally mark one of my comment Alerts as spam around that time, so that may be the cause. Note that this may happen even if you go back into your spam folder and say "This Is Not Spam" on the Alert e-mail.

In any case, if you stop getting Alerts delivery all of a sudden, the first thing you should do is check your Alerts settings and make sure they're turned on.

* Maximum Number of Alerts: Now, here's another piece of info I didn't know until now -- I got word from the Alerts team that the maximum number of alerts allowable per user is 200, which includes all types of alerts. If you go over 200, you may run into problems.

In the past, I'd known that some of you had 200 or more Alerts, but I didn't connect the dots until now. The workaround, of course, is to delete Alerts that may be inactive or otherwise unused, to keep your under the 200-Alert limit.

Now, honestly, when Iheard that some of you have over 200 Alerts, I thought you were kind of, well... crazy. Personally, between all of my e-mail accounts, I get dozens (sometimes hundreds) of e-mails every day, so the thought of trying to keep tabs of 200 Alerts on top of that makes me kind of dizzy. However, I know everyone has their own way of doing things the way they like, so who am I to judge?

I will, however, offer an alternative -- to keep track of a large number of Journals and blogs, I would recommend using a feedreader, which I think is a cleaner solution than getting lots of different alerts -- I will definitely be writing more about RSS feeds in coming entries, though in the meantime, you can see what I blogged before about using feedreaders to keep track of blogs and other Web pages that use feeds.

Don't let the jargon fool you -- feeds are just another way to subscribe to blogs and other content, and you can read them in a feedreader program, which is sort of what an e-mail program is to managing your e-mail.

Personally, I've tried a bunch of different feedreader programs; most of them are free, some of them are Web-based (which is convenient, since you can check your feeds no matter where you go), and most of them are "smart" enough that they can find the feed associated with any given URL; some I've tried include:

* Customizable Web Home Pages, like the My AOL Beta, My Yahoo! or the Google customized page.

* Web Feedreaders like Bloglines or NewsGator

* Standalone Feedreader Programs like NetNewsWire Lite, which is a freeware feedreader that works on Mac OSX.

There's a whole list of different feedreading programs and services available at http://www.atomenabled.org/everyone/atomenabled/index.php?c=5 -- we also link to this page in the popup window linked from the top of every AOL Journal, where it says Get the Feed (Atom/RSS):

For example, this what you'll see when you click the link at the top of my blog. (This is also how you can find out your Journal's feed address.)

I know there are more Alerts, Feeds, and other questions and problems out there; between Product Manager Susan and myself, we will try to keep you informed.

Thanks -- Joe