In light of the various bits of news we are hit with almost daily lately, from various limitations and sanctions placed on content creators on the usual platforms like Facebook and Twitter and, especially regarding cash sanctions, YouTube, to outright chaos caused by abrupt policy change and change-back on the part of OnlyFans and others here and there, where adoption of a particular platform on which to place not only one’s content and fan engagement, but financial dependence, it is almost unfathomable that people still willingly hand over the keys to their kingdom to these platforms and their backing corporate interests. [Was that one long sentence? Yipes!]. As a programmer myself, the ability to compose my own workflows and create my own tools and whatnot is something that should be high on the list of mitigations, to avoid getting tied up and bogged down with weird policies and policy changes, shortcomings in the way of tools and APIs, and worse sometimes, changes to these without suitable warning.
There is an embarrassment of riches at our disposal nowadays, it is purely laziness, really, that prevents the nerdles from developing and deploying their own leading edge platforms, or at least tools and components to integrate with other existing components and tools, to own their presence online. This has been my recent goal, as it fits under the large golf umbrella of developing web-based applications anyway. Sure, Wordpress is a thing (which is definitely ready for the masses and remains in the majority of deployed content management tools, from what I understand), but choose any hero’s journey and along the way there is a milestone at which the hero builds their own solution, be it a canoe, a computer, or a lightsaber.
That Revue has some existing integrations and this rudimentary API means I can continue to explore this platform as a service and send it content from my own publishing platform(s), for projects like this personal “vanity” web presence, to a sign-up newsletter for new projects pre-launch, to a summary non-member newsletter, etc.
Revue doesn’t seem to expose the final construction calls, to update an issue image, adjust the send parameters, or to actually send the issue. There are several missing pieces, but at least there is a puzzle with open spots to fill, so it will be the near-term tool for some of the use cases I mentioned, maybe others, and fit into the overarching challenge of primary self-publishing and a migration away from third party platforms as primaries (that is, if I am posting original content to Revue or Twitter or, perish the thought, Facebook, I’m doing it wrong, and for the time being I am still doing it wrong…).