I still view this blog as the primary format for each day’s writing. I format essays for this space, with its specific quirks.
However, I know 700+ people have signed up to receive daily emails instead of visiting the site, and that experience has become worse.
Follow.it, the service I chose a few years back when Google stopped updating its Feedburner service, says it doesn’t send spam. “Of course not!” its F.A.Q. assures us. But if the emails contain nothing but a link to the posting and a bunch of unrelated and unsightly ads, that’s not the information you want to see, nor the information I want to share.
Now I’m trying to figure out what I can do about that.
One possibility is to leave the options as they are but highlight other ways to see each day’s posting for people who don’t enjoy the Follow.it default.
Another path would be to move to a different service for email deliveries. That would undoubtedly leave some subscribers behind. And I haven’t found anything out there that definitely works better.
A third path would be to reimagine Boston 1775 as an email newsletter through a service like Ghost. I’m wary of that choice since it would also lose some subscribers and could mean entering and formatting each day’s posting twice, in different forms, with an added cost for the privilege. But perhaps there are benefits to that approach I haven’t factored in.
Any comments and suggestions will be considered. No change is imminent, which may or may not be a good thing.
This Boston 1775 webpage remains public and free for anyone to read. All nineteen years of posts are here, outdated links and all. And I’m determined to maintain this page for twenty years at least.
It's a problem, for sure. When I looked into this, I determined that if you want to send blog posts out by email, you either use a paid service, or you're stuck with a service that dumps a lot of ads in.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of my own experience, I use Wordpress for my blog, and used to use a free plugin that sent posts out via email. When that plugin stopped being supported, I determined that a paid subscription to MailChimp would have been the best replacement option. Except it was more money than I wanted to spend. Yes, I probably lost some readers, but I just didn't have the budget.
The truth is, readers who are accustomed to social media demand things I can't provide (or can't afford). And AI is killing traditional search, so it's going to be increasingly difficult for new readers to find my blog. This all appears to be the trend for those of us independent bloggers that are still out here. But — in the spirit of 1775 — I remain committed to having an independent blog that's freely available to all readers. Hope you can stick it out as well!