adding email/newsletter

A friend did reach out, after my last meta post, to say "Hey I'm following along" which I appreciated. But it's probably time to upgrade the infrastructure here and add an email/newsletter option. There's an RSS feed for anyone still using that medium through it's current winter (I use The Old Reader), but it never reached ubiquity even during it's heyday. Newsletters are all the rage these days, with "as a service" stoking a wave of startups and media continuing to fragmentize and personalize. From bare metal email, to MailChimp, to TinyLetter, to Substack as the latest hotness, software continues to eat even the software world.

But to get back to this platform here... It won't stay just a journal. I want to radiate my efforts and thinking out so that folks can connect with my experiences and resonate in some way. That may be "feeling connected" just by reading, or joining in my future experiments and ventures for those with similar passions.

So it's an outreach tool, it is media that is social, and I think the conventions for "newsletter" make an easy form factor for me to put out more sequential and relational writing. I won't email out every little thing I write, but rather do some curation on top of that. Maybe once a month as a baseline? I find it hard to keep up with the amount of weekly personal newsletters I'm already subscribed to, and "tiers" of frequency sounds too complex for now. I'll just treat it like a magazine, more or less.

I'll keep the archive available so people can read back-issues or start at the beginning of they want. And this site is personal and will stay that way to support my own self-reflection practice. If particular organizations/things take off, those would be separate.

I thought about Substack and a few other options, but am going to try using the built-in Ghost support. No extra domains/sites, full control, but enough building blocks provided that all I have to do is tweak my template with some handlebars logic and form attributes. Hopefully they've figured out the core "sending emails (that play nicely with spam filters)" part well enough.