New Subscription Option

Back in the golden days of blogging, RSS was all the rage. Really Simple Syndication is still around, but I’d be surprised if you’re using it to keep up with your favorite websites, podcasts, etc. I no longer use it, and I do miss it sometimes.

RSS was (and still is) a simple (duh) mechanism by which a “subscriber” receives immediate notice that something new has been uploaded to a website; these push notices free the user from having to manually check for updates. If you see the icon shown at right on a website, that tells you that the site offers an RSS feed that you can subscribe to.

Now, please feel free to forget everything I just wrote, because this has nothing to do with RSS, other than to contrast what’s going on at the Gazette with what it once provided. For the past several years, I’ve been using Facebook as sort of a manual RSS-type notification service wherein I post a brief comment about something that I’ve just published, and invite folks to click on the link and jump over to the Gazette. It’s been pretty effective — I don’t spend much time at all poring over the blog’s visitor logs, but I estimate that 90% of visits originate from those Facebook links. And, yes, I recognize the irony of using Facebook to keep my blog alive, when it was Facebook itself that killed blogging…or at least put it on life support. Remember this image? I posted it in 2010.

While I’ve been generally satisfied with the Facebook-to-Gazette conduit, I’ve always thought I’d like to try a different approach, and I finally got motivated enough to investigate — and adopt — the subscription option. That’s right; you can now get notified by email whenever something is posted to the Gazette, without having to check the site manually, or rely on Facebook for the prompt. The signup is free and relatively simple, although it does require you to create an account on WordPress.com (WordPress is the software that powers this and millions of other websites).

And if you’re worried about having your inbox filled with [more] spam…well, I assume you must be new to the Gazette, given the infrequency of my postings. No, really — it’s the exception if I post something every week, and most people consider that a blessing.

Anyway, I hope you’ll consider the subscription option, especially since I’ll likely discontinue (or greatly reduce) the notices on Facebook of new articles. I realize that the golden age of blogging is dead and gone, but this is my way of reclaiming some of what made it shine. In any event, you’ll never know how much I appreciate those of you who waste your valuable time perusing these pages. Youse guys are the best!

Need some direction? Here ya go…