I only recently started a premium subscription, and now I’ve begun poking around the newsletter options.
My (micro)blogging is so scattershot, my categories so numerous, that I am thinking of using one of my five allowed blogs for the newsletter. I would use the appropriate rel="canonical" attributes in my links and put something like <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" /> in the site’s header.
As I undertake this new project, I thought I’d ask if anyone else here handles newsletters this way. If so, perhaps you’d like to share a link or a brief take on your experiences?
@MitchWagner and I discussed the possibility of handling newsletters this way, but I’m not sure if you ever got around to experimenting with it, Mitch?
I didn’t do a separate blog for the newsletter, but I did start combining all my updates into a single post and sending it out in one go. Example here:
I decided it was too much friction and un-bloggy so I stopped after a few days. For now, I’m living with my scattershot approach to blogging.
I see you were trying to get everything in a single post. I still haven’t implemented the newsletter, but I will likely skip a lot of microposts, unless I see a theme emerging. If I do that, though, maybe I’ll end up with another blog post. Anyway, my main domain is markstoneman.com, but for the newsletter I chose stoneman.page because it was cheap. And maybe when I get too old to do this stuff, my son will have use for a domain that just has our last name.
A scattershot blog is a perfectly reasonable kind of blog, btw. I’m very, very old school when it comes to blogging. It’s a weblog — a log of things you saw on the web — and also an online diary, where you can publish any thought that you want to share with the world.
At some point in the 2010s I started hearing people saying that a blog post had to be a structured essay and I responded no no no no no. I mean, a blog can be comprised solely of structured essays but it can also be whatever you want it to be.