After the birth of Oscar, I’ve been trying to make the photos readily available to friends and family by putting them online in my Flickr account. Unfortunately though, as easy as I try to make it, they’re all struggling to either see them or keep up-to-date. RSS is way over their heads and only the more Web-inclined of them are willing to sign up to Flickr or use Guess Passes.

In response to this, I’ve gone and made use of some nifty little Web 2.0 tools to make it a lot easier to keep track of Oscar Photos. Most of the work is done in Feedburner so if you haven’t got an account, I suggest you go and sign up.

1. In Flickr, find the photos you want to send out by browsing via your sets, tags or just your account. In this example, I will be using all my photos tagged with “oscar” seeing as there aren’t currently RSS feeds available for sets (get on it Flickr!).
2. Towards the bottom of the photos should be an RSS feed for those photos.

   

   Copy the link.

3. In FeedBurner, paste the feed URL into text box and hit the Next button.
4. Go through the process of creating a FeedBurner feed, giving it a name, friendly URL and any other additions you prefer.
5. Once your feed is created (like http://feeds.feedburner.com/OscarJobling), go to the Publicise tab.
6. Select Email Subscriptions from the left hand menu.
7. Select a feed-via-email service (I’d just keep it with Feedburner for now) and click Activate.
8. Your Flickr Email Subscriptions are now available.
9. You can go through the settings for your email service such as Communication Preferences (what you want the confirmation email to say), Branding (the look of your email) and Delivery Options (your timezone and when you want the emails to be sent).
10. All that is left to do is copy the supplied HTML and put it on your website where you want users to subscribe.
11. There is also an option to just include a link to the form, maybe for an email signature.

Below is the form generated by FeedBurner for this service. I’ve tweaked it a little to suit my needs but the logic is still evident.

So there you have it - Flickr photos, delivered by email. It can’t get any easier than that can it?

Obviously this service can be used for pushing your podcast to users too. I am aware this is creating a “push” service rather than a “pull” service but not all Web 2.0 initiatives have penetrated the masses yet. I’ve noticed a lot of discussions about the future of RSS around the blogosphere, whether it will ever catch on and whether this will be the year for it. I am a massive advocate of RSS and other Web Services but in these early days, it won’t hurt filling those gaps where users still need a push in the right direction.