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Viliam_Bur comments on Open thread, February 15-28, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: David_Gerard 15 February 2013 11:17PM

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Comment author: gwern 22 February 2013 10:15:35PM *  4 points [-]

Reasons for 'not a blog':

  • I don't have any natural place on gwern.net for a blog
  • I've watched people waste countless hours dealing with regular blog software like Wordpress and don't want to go anywhere near it,

Reasons for email specifically:

  • email lists like Google Groups or MailChimp seem both secure and easy to use for once-a-month updates
  • more people seem to still use email than RSS readers these days
  • patio11 says that geeks/Web people systematically underrate the usefulness of an email newsletter
  • there's much more acceptance of charging for an email newsletter
Comment author: Viliam_Bur 25 February 2013 04:26:17PM *  3 points [-]

I don't have any natural place on gwern.net for a blog

How about "blog.gwern.net" or even "gwernblog.net"?

I've watched people waste countless hours dealing with regular blog software like Wordpress and don't want to go anywhere near it,

If some people are willing to pay for your news, maybe you could find a volunteer (by telling them that creating the blog software is the condition for you to publish) to make the website.

To emulate the (lack of) functionality of an e-mail, you only need to log in as the administrator, and write a new article. The Markdown syntax, as used on LW, could be a good choice. Then the website must display the list of articles, the individual articles, and the RSS feed. That's it; someone could do that in a weekend. And you would get the extra functionality of being able to correct mistakes in already published articles, and make hyperlinks between them.

Then you need functionality to manage users: log in as user, change the password, adding and removing users as admin. There could even be an option for users to enter their e-mails, so the new articles will be sent to them automatically (so they de facto have a choice between web and e-mail format). This all is still within a weekend or two of work.

Comment author: gwern 26 February 2013 09:50:12PM 0 points [-]

How about "blog.gwern.net" or even "gwernblog.net"?

I meant in my existing static site setup. (If I were to set up a blog of my own, it would probably go into a subdomain, yes.)

If some people are willing to pay for your news, maybe you could find a volunteer (by telling them that creating the blog software is the condition for you to publish) to make the website.

How would that help?

And you would get the extra functionality of being able to correct mistakes in already published articles, and make hyperlinks between them.

I don't often need to correct mistakes in snippets, month-old LW comments, etc. I do often correct my essays, but those are not the issue.

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