Notices by Richard MacManus (ricmac@mastodon.social), page 7

Also, an update on my migration away from Substack: I have nearly finished building a new website on Eleventy, so I will shortly begin setting up Buttondown. Given I have a full-time job and am still writing the posts, I think I'm on schedule ;) I hope to go-live by end of the month.

It lasted longer than Burbn… (obscure Web 2.0 joke). But seriously, I did try Artifact but didn’t find it compelling. The founders got the timing just right with Instagram — right at the start of the smartphone app revolution. But I feel like their luck and timing was out this time…it’s now the start of the fediverse revolution, which will bring blogs and decentralized social media to the fore, not centralized apps like Artifact. https://medium.com/artifact-news/shutting-down-artifact-1e70de46d419

Ghost is getting a lot of buzz right now as a Substack alternative. Important to point out though that the hosted version is expensive *unless* you have scale and are already profitable. Sure you can run it on a rented web server, but most of us either don’t have the tech nous or the inclination to do that (I used to do this with RWW, so I have enough nous — I just don’t want to do it now). Anyway, this is why I have chosen to build an Eleventy website and use Buttondown for email. #YMMV

Blast from the past; I think I remember reading this in 2002. But I don’t remember “blogrolling” used in this context?! -> “Weblog writers and other participants in the Living Web gain readers
by exchanging links and ideas. Seeking to exchange links without
ideas is vulgarly known as blogrolling.” https://front-end.social/@zeldman/111725970308064525

Meetup has been acquired by the same company that bought Evernote last year: Bending Spoons. https://www.meetup.com/blog/a-new-home-for-meetup/. What other Web 2.0 darlings might they snap up? (Pity I don't still own ReadWriteWeb, otherwise I'd be sliding into CEO Luca Ferrari's DMs)

I'm so glad we have @judell writing for @TheNewStack. I had the pleasure of editing his latest, which has some excellent learnings for working with #LLMs. I will be trying to use these guiding principles in my own work, whether dev or writing. https://thenewstack.io/7-guiding-principles-for-working-with-llms/

Hmm, perhaps this federating across networks thing still needs work. #NoContext #Nostr

Digg was a big driver of traffic to ReadWriteWeb back in 2006. I tried to show my appreciation to Digg CEO Kevin Rose several years later by buying him and his friend a lamb dinner in New Zealand. Sadly Digg imploded soon after. Here’s what it was like in 2006 though! https://www.cybercultural.com/p/015-digg-power-laws-of-silicon-valley #internethistory #web20

Forecasting web development trends in 2024, I see an increase in fediverse dev, more AI dev tool usage, multimodal AI and less JavaScript. https://thenewstack.io/web-dev-2024-fediverse-ramps-up-more-ai-less-javascript/

Ok the latest idea I am kicking around re finding a Substack alternative: a website built with @eleventy or WordPress, with email subscription via @buttondown API. I saw something like this at Robin Rendle’s site @fonts. He hosts a newsletter called The Cascade (https://robinrendle.com/the-cascade/), which is hosted on his site and then sent out via email using Buttondown. I don’t yet know if that is automated (site -> BD via api) or a manual copy and paste job?

@jay @eleventy @buttondown That’s exactly what I want to do. Have you per chance written up how you built that?

@jay @eleventy @buttondown I will avidly read that!

@jay @eleventy @buttondown Thanks Jay, loved the detail in that post.

Happens to be my favourite chocolate bar :) -> “I think RSS and ActivityPub are like peanut butter and chocolate and it will be awesome when they are combined.” https://flipboard.social/@mike/111598734844490245

This is a savvy read on Substack’s current predicament as a company. I still scan Notes to see what folks are saying and not everyone on there is a parrot -> “…it’s reasonable to believe that the cost of doing business for we writers on here will change for the worse over time.” https://substack.com/@biblioracle/note/c-46102496?r=4z27&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

@evan absolutely, do you have a recommendation?

p.s. I *will* be moving off Substack in the new year, but I am still evaluating alternatives. I had pre-prepared a few posts before Christmas (and before the Substack controversy began) and this is one of them. Thank you for your patience. #IndiePublisher

Over 2006, I ramp up Read/WriteWeb's advertising business, by first partnering with John Battelle's FM Publishing and then copying TechCrunch's sidebar ad format. #internethistory #web20 https://www.cybercultural.com/p/014-the-sponsor-ads-era-2006

If anyone is wondering what the price of using an alternative to Substack is for my (rather humble in terms of audience size) newsletter … gulp. Anyone know of other good, preferably lower price, options?

Another good suggestion via Threads (I’m manually federating for now!)