(This is more of a housekeeping post than an actual post with content; apologies.)
Up until now, my blogging strategy has been to write new posts about once a week and publicize them on Twitter, which works great for people who are on Twitter but (obviously) fails for people who aren’t on Twitter. I’m frequently asked if there are non-Twitter ways to subscribe to the blog updates: given that I myself don’t love relying on Twitter to bring me content, and that Twitter itself feels increasingly dicey, I feel bad saying no every time.
I’m happy to announce that there are now two additional ways to read the blog: RSS and Substack.
RSS is a lovely way to get updates from sites, which is sadly limited by the fact that nobody uses it anymore. (Half the people I talk to these days don’t even know what it is.) You can use an RSS aggregator like Feedly, and simply subscribe to various sites, so that they’ll dependably show up in your feed. This is the main way I get journal updates and my news.
So, if you like using RSS, you can simply search “corinwagen.github.io” in Feedly, and the blog will come up:
Substack is a platform that helps people write and manage newsletters. It essentially solves the problem of “how do I create an email list”/“how do I manage subscriptions” for people who would rather not take care of hosting a web service and handling payments themselves, like me.
I initially didn’t want to use Substack because (1) I wanted the blog to be part of my website, (2) I liked being able to control every aspect of the design, and (3) I wasn’t sure if anyone would read the blog, and there’s nothing sadder than an empty Substack. As things stand, (3) is a non-issue, so the question is whether the added convenience of Substack outweighs my own personal design and website preferences. I suspect that it may, so I’ve capitulated and copied all existing posts over to my new Substack. (There are a few formatting issues in old posts, but otherwise things copied pretty well.)
For now, I plan to continue posting everything on the blog, and manually copying each post over to Substack (I write in plain HTML so this is not too hard). If Substack ends up totally outperforming the blog in terms of views, then I’ll probably switch to Substack entirely for blogging and just leave my website up as a sort of virtual CV.
(I have no plans to enable subscriptions at this point; that being said, if for some bizarre reason there’s sufficient demand I’ll probably try to think of something to reward subscribers.)
If you’d like to receive updates on Substack, you can subscribe below: