For a while after the site went into CTCAJW (“cut the crap and just write”) Mode a few weeks back, I suddenly started issuing posts with greater frequency, even as often as multiple times a day. This caused me to re-think my previous habit of always promoting each new post on social media, given that this now would become (even more of) an irritant to anyone who might follow me.
Hence, I began a series of every-Saturday posts1, “The site this week,” each of which would briefly summarize the previous week’s posts; then, I’d promote just that post. I hoped that would get the word out there well enough without being too annoying.
It’s worked fine until now; but, more recently, I’ve been thinking:
- Wasn’t part of CTCAJW Mode also supposed to have been the freedom to avoid writing when I didn’t have a good reason, regardless of how long it had been since the previous post? (Yep.)
- So, how would a “The site this week” summary look if I wrote only one or two, or even no, posts in a given week? (Probably kinda weird.)
I’ve never forgotten how one of my professors back in graduate school, eons ago, always emphasized that one’s writing should practice “economy of words.” He didn’t mean being unacceptably brief or abruptly terse, but rather simply making sure that whatever one wrote was only as long as truly needed.
And, to be sure, if there’s no overriding reason to write something at a given time — right.
For these reasons and some others, I’m trimming back the summaries, and may even eliminate them altogether. (Accordingly, I will be promoting this post on its own, just to get the word out there.) If I start them again, they won’t be based on a fixed timeline. Rather, I’ll publish a summary when it seems right.2 Again: that’s if I re-start the summaries.
Finally, please keep in mind that the site’s feeds are always standing by to keep interested readers apprised of each new post when it hits the web. Just point your feed reader app to my site URL and let it do the rest. As the inestimable Sara Soueidan expressed it so well today on Twitter:
Will you get sick of me repeating just how much I love RSS? 🥹
Every time I paste a URL into my RSS reader and it finds a feed and I subscribe to it, I get the same little dopamine rush that brings me back to Twitter to tweet my appreciation for everyone who has an RSS feed. 🥹
5:32 PM • July 5, 2022 (UTC)
Not to be confused with the Saturday Evening Post, of course. ↩︎
After all, “when it seems right” is the “frequency,” if you want to call it such, which I think CTCAJW Mode indicates for the posts themselves, so it should work for any summaries, too. ↩︎
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