to answer your question, no, i have it running sweetly now, thanks to thesacredpath and husdal. as it turns out, i never needed to go into feedburner to set it to show only the title. instead, i followed thesacredpath's advice and got the exact result i wanted:

"You might try going to settings > reading and setting your feed to show only an excerpt and see what that does. It may take a few minutes for your feed to update, but then check at http://unsettledskies.wordpress.com/feed to see it. The image should then be gone. What feedburner will actually end up showing is anyone's guess though."

i made that one change and that took care of the problem. now my email notification is just the title and a couple lines of text. my blog is a little unusual in that each post is a comic comprised of just one single image, so the problem i was having was the entire post was being emailed to my subscribers, my entire comic.

now, along with the comic image, i also type in a line or two about the post, which feedburner sends to subscribers along with the title. i couldn't be happier...

to answer your question, no, i have it running sweetly now, thanks to thesacredpath and husdal. as it turns out, i never needed to go into feedburner to set it to show only the title. instead, i followed thesacredpath's advice and got the exact result i wanted:

"You might try going to settings > reading and setting your feed to show only an excerpt and see what that does. It may take a few minutes for your feed to update, but then check at http://unsettledskies.wordpress.com/feed to see it. The image should then be gone. What feedburner will actually end up showing is anyone's guess though."

i made that one change and that took care of the problem. now my email notification is just the title and a couple lines of text. my blog is a little unusual in that each post is a comic comprised of just one single image, so the problem i was having was the entire post was being emailed to my subscribers, my entire comic.

now, along with the comic image, i also type in a line or two about the post, which feedburner sends to subscribers along with the title. i couldn't be happier...

The other part to my original question was whether it is possible to mess with the html code in feedburner to make it more of an announcement than a feed. I'm guessing that's a bad idea. I do think my friend (see original query) is on the right track, tweaking the code a little to make it open in a new window, at least.

Thanks again, thesacredpath, for pointing out that some of the Feedburner code is missing. I'll go back and get it again, and I'll try your other suggestion under the optimize tab. Hopefully Feedburner will end up sending emails that's don't reveal my entire single-image posts. Hopefully it'll send the titles only.

I wonder if it would help the situation if I added a brief line or two of text along with my single, comic-blog image. Maybe that way Feedburner could grab the text and leave the image alone. I guess I can play with that. If it still sends the entire post, I'll just remove the Feedburner subscription widget altogether from my blog...

I appreciate your help with this, but my original question has not been addressed. Maybe I wasn't clear enough: I'm looking for a way to send subscribers a simple message notifying them that's there's a new post available, along with the link to my blog--not the actual post. I'm not really trying to send a feed--I just want to give notification to subscribers that there's a new post to check out. Is there no other widget, tool, html code, etc. to send email notification to subscribers, not an actual feed?

You might try going to settings > reading and setting your feed to show only an excerpt and see what that does. It may take a few minutes for your feed to update, but then check at http://unsettledskies.wordpress.com/feed to see it. The image should then be gone. What feedburner will actually end up showing is anyone's guess though.

<a href="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=XXXXXX&loc=en_US" >Subscribe to Blah Blah Blah by Email</a>

Here's the code again, between barticks this time: <div class="textwidget"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Unsettledskies&loc=en_US" target="_blank">Subscribe to Unsettledskies by Email</a></div>

To post code here in the forums, put the code between backticks ( ` ) which is typically on the key to the left of the #1 key.

I'd like a widget in my sidebar where readers can subscribe to my blog and receive an email notifying them of my latest scintillating post. I have done much hunting around for an answer for this, and I take it Feedburner is the ticket? Is Feedburner the ONLY way to accomplish this (with a free wordpress.com blog)?

I currently have Feedburner functioning nicely as a subscription widget in my sidebar. The big problem with it is it sends emails out with my ENTIRE POST contained therein. Why is that a problem? I'm trying to get readers to COME to my blog, not the other way around! So I'm looking for a work-around that will send my subscribers a simple message notifying them that's there's a new post available, along with the link to my blog--not the actual post.

I don't know HTML, but I'm guessing I could alter the code in Feedburner to achieve these 2 ends. Incidentally, a friend of mine who does know HTML tweaked the Feedburner code a little so that when a prospective subscriber clicks on the Feedburner subscription widget in my sidebar, the subscription form opens in a SEPARATE WINDOW. That way, when they've finished subscribing, they can continue browsing my blog. With the standard Feedburner code, there's no way to get BACK to the original blog after subscribing). If anyone wants to see that code, here it is (my friend also added spaces so that "subscribe to Unsettledskies by Email" wasn't all jammed together, as it originally appeared in my sidebar):

<div class="textwidget">Subscribe to Unsettledskies by Email</div>