It's time to make a move. Join me!
TL;DR: I’ve decided to take this newsletter elsewhere. Basically, long form writing will appear occasionally at houfu.github.io, while shorter form writing will appear on Buy Me a Coffee’s membership tier. The members’ mailing list will be the main fulcrum of my activities.
To thank you for being around, or there first, you will receive an invite to be a (free) lifetime member in your email boxes in due course. Please join me in this new chapter!
Oh it’s a perennial dilemma.
When I hunker down to write code, I missed out on the blog, and it looks like I have forgotten folks here. I have been coding a lot, but without any time to share it.
Unfortunately, most of it have been failed experiments. At least, they make a wellspring of content for a blog once I get over the disappointment that I wasted my time.
So, I have to take a break and recalibrate. Writing is always a nice break and I’ve been studying what I liked and don’t like about Love Law Robots.
- Even though I managed to persevere with posting on a regular schedule for some time, it was painful. At least some of it was due to the fact that I don’t like write.as interface or how ugly their newsletters turned out.
- I still have no idea how to encourage subscriptions. I don’t think the content on the blog was good enough, and furthermore, people don’t seem to subscribe because of the blog.
In the meantime, there have been changes in my environment. Firstly, LinkedIn, despite my misgivings on my audience there, has become a more viable place to talk about my work. Twitter/X or Mastodon… not so much.
The crucial point is that I shouldn’t be making a newsletter. I should be doing other things, like coding and reading and sharing. Being free of writing a newsletter means I shouldn’t focus on a blogging platform, but a stack.
And this is the stack I am looking to implement:
- Socials such as LinkedIn, Mastodon and the like, for quick, “free”, no obligation sharing
- Buy Me a Coffee memberships and digital products to keep my readers and fund my projects
- A static webpage, occasionally updated with long form writing, but probably as some sort of semi-permanent landing page.
As part of the transition, I’d be giving away memberships. At some level, it’s to thank you for sticking around with me. At another level… thanks for being a guinea pig and testing my theories.
I’m hoping that this will be a more efficient use of my limited energies. There’s a lot to be excited for in the coming months!
One last thing — although I am certainly not in this for the money, it’s an important point of principle to me that the projects are financially sustainable. It’s always intellectually simulating to figure out how to make money out of something but I like to think it makes them rational*. So, I wouldn’t begrudge you for taking what I am offering, but to give a little tip for something valuable is a nice and polite.
(One of my failed experiments concerns spending over US$200 a month to collect thousands of law related newspaper articles in Singapore… and I don’t know what to do with them. It’s important to urrm think through what you are doing.)
Love.Law.Robots. – A blog by Ang Hou Fu
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