There’s been a lot of buzz lately around the interwebs, the blogosphere, and even the MailChimp office about the state of FeedBurner. But let’s back up. In June of last year, it was quietly announced that the FeedBurner API would be deprecated with no scheduled date for shut down. The date was later updated to October of this year. And then in July, there were a couple mysterious tweets, which led to a lot of speculation. And blog posts. And then obviously more tweets.

But what does this mean? Is Google, gulp, shuttering FeedBurner as we know it?

To be honest, I don’t know. I’ve scoured the web, done my research, and I’m scratching my head with the rest of you. The only confirmed fact is that (NERD ALERT) the API is shutting down in a couple weeks. For you non-nerds and semi-nerds, nothing else is official. In fact, everything else is speculation, so I won’t try to guess what’s going to happen. Plus, it wouldn’t be very nice of Google to shut down a product that so many people, blogs, and businesses rely on without notice, would it? But one thing’s certain: it’s never a bad idea to know your options and be prepared. You know, just in case.

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If you’re a blogger, you probably feel like there’s barely enough time in the day to update your blog, let alone think about sending an email newsletter. But some of your readers might prefer to get your posts in their inbox instead of visiting your site every day or subscribing to your feed. MailChimp’s RSS-to-Email tool simplifies that process, so you can publish your content once on the blog, and we’ll automatically send it to your newsletter subscribers as often as you’d like.

RSS-to-Email was tailor-made for busy bloggers. It fills in the holes left by just including a “follow by RSS” option and puts you in more frequent contact with your readers. You don’t even have to write new content for your newsletters, it all comes directly from the carefully crafted blog updates you’re already posting. Plus, you get a ton of customization options built right in. All you need is an RSS URL and a MailChimp account. Want to include more than one RSS feed? Read this article before you set up your campaign.

You don’t have to send your loyal followers a barrage of emails. You have the power to decide how often the RSS campaigns go out–daily, weekly, or monthly. And a campaign will only go out if there’s a new post on your blog. You can choose what time you prefer to send your newsletters, too. So if you write a weekend city guide, you might want to send your campaigns on Fridays at 8am, when readers are daydreaming about their weekend plans. Or maybe you post one recipe a day to your cooking blog, so daily at noon might be more logical.

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During a recent update, we added the ability to include RSS feeds inside of both regular and A/B split campaign types. This is great if you want to add a feed of your most recent blog posts to the side column of your newsletter, for example.

In order to create the campaign shown above, I started out by selecting Create Campaign ==> Regular Ol’ Campaign in my MailChimp dashboard. In step 3 I chose the 3:1 Start From Scratch template because I knew I’d be showcasing meaty, longer form content in the body of my email before pulling in my RSS feeds below.

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One thing we do with our @mailchimp twitter account is we tag our favorite tweets from customers. For example, if someone tweets something like this:

You "fav a tweet" by clicking the little star in the corner

we click the little “favorite” star, and it gets saved in our list of favorites. It’s basically like bookmarking a web page, but for tweets. We then dynamically pull those favs into our MailChimp website (such as on our testimonials page). On the side, we’ll occasionally send those nice tweets around the office by email.

Then Amanda, our Chief Twitter Officer, realized something cool: all our favorites are available via RSS feed, so we can actually use MailChimp’s RSS-to-email tool to automatically send twittermonials to our entire team. Here’s how…

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Douglass Karr over at the Marketing Technology Blog has helped develop a mobile alert plugin for a crime alert website in Indiana.  Alerts are also available as a once-daily email, which is powered using MailChimp’s RSS-to-Email feature!

Started November 1, 2008 and currently serving the Terre Haute and Bloominton, Indiana metro areas, B-Aware sends out crime alerts compiled from local police blotters.  The organization’s goal is to facilitate greater crime awareness amongst local residents.