The Thursday Newsletter - Issue #18

Pause or Stop…

If you’ve wondered over to the Buy Me a Coffee profile page with links and other details about this and that, you know that I’ve been giving the double newsletter approach the old college try for a few weeks now. Not only this Dan Hugo content (riveting, yes), but two newsletters for each of three podcast shows as well (a Show Notes newsletter via Substack and a Weekend Edition via Revue).

My goal here was mostly to try out the new coolness that is newsletters (as opposed to bulk emailing via Constant Contact, Mailchimp, etc, independent content creators jumped in head first with Substack, and Twitter bought Revue, and there are some other platforms like paper.li and buttondown.email and probably many more than one would think could exist at one time). I have been known to write a word or two now and then, and I do have a Medium account (http://danhugo.medium.com ) and I did just add another article in the Danny DeKeto series (about following a ketogenic diet).

I think emailed newsletters are useful and appealing. I take a few emailed news sources and I read them when I can, and they are there waiting for me if I can’t. I also visit the associated websites where applicable, and I am a big fan of RSS feeds (though they should be deprecated in favor of embedding schema.org metadata, IMHO… but the idea is generally good).

I don’t particularly like the way content is constructed (this is particularly true with Substack, though their online editor is better than that used by Revue, for what that’s worth), and there are some other issues that probably fall under the “Service A lets you do a, b, and c, while Service B lets you do those and e, but if you want d, too bad.” The workflow could use some work, or some flexibility, but at the end of the day, for me, I would rather be able to own the workflow.

None of this is helped by the fact that I’m not getting much traction with the Revue newsletters. I haven’t spent a lot of time analyzing this, because I would rather migrate to generation of newsletters (and syndication feeds, and whatever else) from a core content database that is mine, mine, mine. No surprise here, I should be able to turn an idea into an implementation, and that time is rapidly approaching.

So, if the stars align and the amount of smoke in the air here in Vegas stays about the same or heads back toward whatever normal is, I would like to transition this newsletter (and Substack, second) to the blog-based newsletter approach, where I add items to a backing store (database, whatever) and from there build the things, like web pages and email newsletters and whatnot. Nothing magic here, other than, use of Revue will be paused for August (across all of my newsletter efforts, not just this one) and we’ll see what can get done…

Stay tuned, and if you get an issue of this newsletter in your inbox after this one, it will likely be a request that you subscribe to the New newsletter scheme.

The big moving days are now just over two weeks away, and while I have the logistics sorted, and I even have a home covid-19 test kit coming (2 tests for $20, not bad) so I can check that before I head to Phoenix for the move gap, but the big thing now is purging and then packing. The purging will be less fun initially, until I end up packing and moving less mass.

As I suggested above, I want to replace the current newsletter tool(s) with my own platform, which actually fits into just about everything I’m working on, so why not try that while I need to purge and pack on a deadline?

You can start laughing now if you’d like.

The weather forecast for my locality is, once again, Smoke. I suppose there are any number of even less appealing scenarios (where we are inland, actual fire, earthquakes, or radioactive reptilian monsters would be substantially worse) but my voice and sinuses are definitely not enjoying the extended remix that is Southern Nevada Air Quality, especially the apparent match between the particulates here and the particulates that cause maximum allergic reaction in me.

That said, it would S U C K to be touched by the actual fires that are causing all of this smoke, so I am not complaining so much as just sort of mentioning the situation. If I’m not mistaken, these fires happen every year, and that seems like something we should be taking a closer look at.

I’m sort of toying with stopping in at the Pinball Hall of Fame, which I mentioned a couple of months back as a to-do item that got swept out of the way by other to-do items and the increasing prevalence of sick people in the Las Vegas area. I still want to check it out before I hit the road, otherwise I assume it will still be there in October.

As for Pizza, well, I have had a microwave pizza now and then over the last several months, but I’ve missed a nice, well-made pizza that is actually not so difficult to find around the Las Vegas area. I actually have thoughts of a Calzone in my head, and so I’m sort of leaning toward testing out Good Pie downtown. There was a place that made really good calzone (fried or baked) closer to where I actually live, but over the years the two favorite places near me for pizza-like items seemed to sort of fade from the top of the list. Isn’t that the way? I’m sure there will be pictures, which I can post and share in the new publishing regime!

If you’ve been reading the Thursday Newsletter here on Revue at all, thanks! As I mentioned above, I’ll send out one finale here if I can manage to migrate the notion of newsletters to my own platform in a way that works nicely, overlayed on my moving efforts. In other words, this may roll out post-relocation in September. We shall see!

In the mean time, I am still going to use the Buy Me a Coffee profile as a sort of link hub, separated from my actual projects (I have called this out-of-band), and I have added on a link tree thing called bio.link (from the same BMaC people) as another experiment, have a look at either as more things unfold and/or come together. Is that mixing metaphors?

There is no obligation at all to actually buy any coffee there, but it’s a convenient way to enable that opportunity while also enabling a central place to provide cross-project links and updates and whatnot. It is what it is.

Photo by sergio souza from Pexels