Long story short, I told a bunch of friends I was going to create a Google Groups email newsletter to be less horrible about never communicating. Two months later (ahem), I got around to responding to the responders.
I used Google Groups to run a condo committee (mumble mumble) years ago. When I logged in, the group was still there. Everything was where I left it, and I mean *everything*. If Google Groups has changed, I couldn’t see it. Maybe it was a little worse, or maybe I was just having flashbacks from trying to navigate Google Cloud Platform Dashboard with its outstandingly hateful UX. After that discouraging experience, the possibility of a newsletter dropped to effectively zero. Having another outbox that actively encourages me to neglect it was not going to work.
Then I asked a friend (cough Perplexity cough) about the state of WordPress plugins that might help. I’d always been impressed by their plugin framework and how it created a thriving ecosystem, but (mumble mumble) years ago I found the state of email-related plugins to be pretty dismal. That was part of what pushed me to see Twitter (and now Mastodon and BlueSky) as blog replacements.
It turns out WordPress has been evolving furiously in those (mumble mumble) years. I use JetPack on my blogs, and it turns out the Subscriptions feature was already included–and already *ON* for TheTmpFiles? It’s free and has somewhere between lots and too many features. One feature in particular caught my eye: monetization.
Newsletters have been quite the thing lately with Substack feeling like the 21st century version of Blogger. Evolution and opportunism go hand in hand as our species demonstrates. Posts can be restricted to paid subscribers, and that means WordPress.com needs to know who those paid subscribers are. All subscribers need a WordPress Reader account to “facilitate” the interaction; i.e., to extract their cut either as currency or data. This applies even to free content. Ick.
Monetization might be a little icky, but the UI is pretty nice. Publish allows “post only” too. Surprise! I had subscribers without even knowing the feature existed!
I already have a WordPress account for blog administration, and I use my Google Account for the login. The mix of complexity and a soft data grab is going to be a downside for my group of friends, some technical and some not. It doesn’t look like a credit card is required–thankfully–at least as long as I don’t get age-restricted.
Regardless, the best way to learn is to do, so I’m going to give it a shot on two of my blogs. Feel free to subscribe (although be aware it may go away if my research takes a bad turn). Have you used Subscriptions on your own WordPress blog? Let me know how it went, especially if it went badly!