I need blog help

I'm using "Live Bookmarks", which puts an icon in my "links" bar; when I click the icon it provides a drop-down list of all recent posts (hyper-linked to a page of that post and all comments pertaining to that post). The program does not alert me to the existence of a new post, nor does the drop-down list indicate if there is a new comment re: a previous post. Is there a better way to do this? I want to be alerted (through email, perhaps) whenever there is anything new on the blog, and pointed in its direction.