Anyone still casting around for a new year's resolution that's not going to be too hard to keep could do worse than head in the direction of Scotland's national poet, or at least in the direction of his letters.

Two hundred and fifty years after Robert Burns's birth, the National Trust for Scotland is publishing his letters online, each one on the day it was originally written. They've chosen the years 1787-1789, partly because the three-year period fits in with the construction of the Robert Burns Birthplace museum, due in 2010, but mostly because it's one of the most interesting and prolific periods of the poet's letter-writing career.

Kicking off in December, we had the first of his letters written to Agnes McLehose, the Nancy of "Ae Fond Kiss", which turns on an engagement to drink tea. By the end of the month, Burns was looking back with a pang of regret that he did not know her sooner, and confessing in a letter to Captain Brown that he is "ready to hang [himself] for a young Edinburgh widow, who has wit and beauty more murderously fatal than the assassinating stiletto of the Sicilian Banditti, or the poisoned arrow of the savage African."

There are also letters to his admirer, Mrs Dunlop of Dunlop, his friend Robert Ainslie and others. More than ninety are promised by the time the museum opens its doors in 2010, and can be delivered to the RSS reader of your choice with just one click. Happy new year.