It’s definitely not a good thing to have to go to this website to see if anything new has happened — for example, I just missed several weeks of content because I thought nothing was happening! Wordpress is definitely up to the task of sending email alerts to users when there are new posts/comments (indeed, I think these are already enabled when someone comments on a post you are the author of).
There are two ways to do this that I know of:
1) Install a plugin such as Subscribe2. Since the math department hosts this blog, and I don’t see a plugins tab on the side of the screen when I go to the admin page, this probably requires Vivek writing to the sysadmin to request this.
2) Migrate the whole thing to wordpress.com (note the distinction from wordpress.org), which has free hosting and automatically has email alert functionality. Or just relaunch there — it takes <5 minutes to set up a blog.
Before trying something drastic like migrating, let me try writing the sysops to install this plugin.
What kills me is that the “Recent Activity” isn’t even correct. It consistently omits new posts.
Regarding the recent activity, I think the issue is that it consistently omits private posts. Maybe we should just stop making private posts, I don’t know why we do it in the first place.
Also now it’s possible to subscribe, but again I haven’t figured out how to make notifications for private posts go out.
Hopefully it will just automatically work with private ones. I don’t know why you want the posts to be public, since the de facto function of this site has been to facilitate informal private communication among a small working group rather than exposition aimed at a larger mathematical audience.
What I was saying is that in fact, I have made a couple test posts which were “private” to see whether the new system notifies me about them, and it does not. Likewise, the precise distinction between which things do and don’t appear in the sidebar is that the public things do and the private things don’t. So as a pragmatic matter, we can have everything appear on the sidebar and everything be mailed out just by making everything public.
(Of course everyone is free to make their posts public or private as they prefer.)