Like to get an email whenever there is a new post on this site? I’ve made a small change to how that works you may want to know about!
Short version:
New blog post notification emails will now come as they happen and are a separate mailing list from the mail mailing list. If you want to receive an email whenever there is a new blog post on this site, the sign up for that is here:
All other email sign-up forms on this site are only for the main mailing list.
Long version:
I have almost always offered the ability to get an email whenever I post a new blog post, even when this blog was hosted on Lycos and I was using feedburner for that service. Several years ago, I switched it from an as-it-happens email to a monthly digest that was an option you could choose while signing up for my main mailing list and that’s how it’s been for a while.
There were two problem with this…
The first was that, because it was just a subscription option on the main mailing list, people who decided they no longer wanted the new blog notifications would hit unsubscribe, not realizing that this removed them from the entire mailing list, not just the new blog notifications. This led to people getting annoyed that they were no longer getting the actual mailing list updates, not realizing they unsubscribed instead of just changing their subscription settings.
My solution for this is that the blog updates are now a completely separate mailing list from the main mailing list. People can join or unsubscribe as many times as they want and it will have no effect on whether they are on or off the main mailing list.
The second problem? Well, it’s harder to explain as it was mostly a mental thing on my part.
Basically, because the digest went out every month that I added even one new blog post AND there was unsubscribe confusion that often resulted in people getting mad at me because they accidentally unsubscribed, I started to get in my head about posting anything. If there weren’t at least x number of posts, would people be annoyed they got the email? Did that person mean to unsubscribe because that blog post was boring or did they just misunderstand how it worked? Is there a certain kind of blog post that people who signed up for the digest prefer to see?
And, yeah, it’s easy to say “don’t worry about stuff like that!” but sometimes we can’t help these things and it was making me overthink every blog post and hold back posts for a lot of somewhat arbitrary reasons. But many of you enjoy the new blog post notification service and have used it for years so I didn’t want to get rid of it entirely.
So here we are!
The new blog post notification list is entirely separate from the main mailing list and fully automated so I never even have to look at it. Which is a small thing, but the set it and forget it nature means I can just go back to posting blog posts randomly like the chaos gremlin that I am and not have to overthinking whether it’s timed correctly for the monthly digest. Blog posts can actually start happening with some kind of regularity again which I am frankly very excited about!
So if you’d like to get an email whenever there is a new blog post, here’s the link to sign up. And if you also want to be on the main mailing list, use any of the other sign-ups forms on this blog!