Thursday, November 26, 2020

Administrative Note

Something I posted on Twitter the other day:

For the record, I am not moving my blog to Substack; I am not starting a newsletter on any platform; I am not going to charge you to read anything I write. (Note: this doesn't apply to, say, a magazine that you need to buy to read an article or review of mine.)

As I noted later, if you're going to charge people to read your newsletter,  in my view, you are committing to writing good-quality newsletters on some kind of regular basis. Maybe it's weekly, maybe twice a month, maybe, if you're wildly prolific, daily. (I am acquainted with a now-former columnist who wrote 800 words five days a week for his column for more than 30 years. It's possible to do this, but it's very, very difficult.) I had a couple of years when I wrote a post more or less daily, which was a lot easier to do when I took a dedicated shuttle to work and had a table and wifi available. In theory, I could do such a thing now, what with WFH, but I haven't been. Maybe next year?

But getting back to the point, no, I'm not going to charge for the blog. I have been very, very lucky and I have a job I like that I can do from home and that pays me well.

That said, there are multiple way to read this blog:

  • Right here, by visiting the URL https://irontongue.blogspot.com/
  • Using a feed reader, such as Google Reader, The Old Reader, Feedly, etc. (Me? Bitter? Yes.)
  • In your email, by asking you to add your email address to the list of addresses that are automatically emailed each post as it's published. Why Blogger doesn't have this as a user-facing feature, I don't know, but as you might have noticed, there was very little development done on Blogger for a long time, which seems to have changed in the last 18 months. Just let me know in comments or by emailing me (lhirsch at Gmail dot com).

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