Technical Difficulties

Ever since its launching in 2006, The Rap Sheet has offered readers the opportunity to subscribe to our posts via a Google-owned Web feed management provider called FeedBurner. All one need do is provide his or her e-mail address in a “Subscribe to The Rap Sheet” box located near the top of the right-hand column on this page. Hundreds of readers have taken advantage of this convenient service, receiving our new articles via daily e-mail messages, and I have rarely (maybe never?) heard complaints about it.

However, yesterday a Rap Sheet follower named Deb wrote me saying: “You should tell people who receive your newsletter and who are utterly frustrated by the format which fails to combine comments with the photos, to go to the blog where all is together!”

She was complaining specifically about the e-mail subscription presentation of a longish post headlined “Harking Back to Harrogate,” in which British correspondent Ali Karim recounted events late last month at England’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. It seems the text came through just fine, but the many photographs gathered at the end of the original post were not always clearly associated with their captions in the e-mailed transmission. This is a problem having to do with differences in formatting—especially column width—between the Web edition of The Rap Sheet and the FeedBurner version. And sadly, it’s something I haven’t the power to fix. (FeedBurner doesn’t allow individual bloggers to specify e-mail column dimensions.) I can only repeat Deb’s suggestion: On those rare occasions when a Rap Sheet post does not come through clearly in a subscription e-mail note, please click on the article’s headline to reach the Web display of that material, instead.

As always, I thank you for your support and understanding.