Last month this blog turned 11-years-old.
Around its birthday I usually take the time to reflect on how my writing has evolved and improved over the years.
This time is different.
342 entries and more than 226,000 words later I’ve decided to change the direction of this site quite drastically.
I’ve been thinking this over for three years now, since 4 Feb 2016 to be exact—judging by the Trello board for it.
My usual approach to any endeavour is to jump in head first and only then figure out if I can actually swim—side note, in reality, I can’t swim.
But things happened. Life Death happened.
So instead of jumping in head first, I ended up thinking things over.
Why I am doing this
The state of the web and the unrelenting speed by which technology is progressing ungoverned makes me terrified and angry on a daily basis.
For the past decade, I’ve been somewhat content swearing at public events, such as Web in the Woods, or writing the occasional article but I’ve mostly kept this blog free of “professional” articles.
I’m not content with that anymore.
Be the change that you wish to see in the world. Mahatma Gandhi
Now, the world is in a terrible state of unrest, stuck between the people who want to change it and those who want it to stay the same—or go back to the 1950s by the sounds of it.
I’m firmly in the group who wants to change the world which means also changing myself.
Where I am doing this
I’m starting right here, in my own little corner of the web.
I’m starting a new site, called superdupercritical.com.
We’ll see where things go from here but it seems like the most sensible place to start.
What I am doing
A dialogue between you and me, in the form of a newsletter.
Every other Tuesday morning, you’ll get a decade of knowledge and experience packed into a 5-minute piece of thoughtful and actionable advice on accessible and inclusive practices.
The topics are going to be different from what I usually write about here—I have a list that currently sits at 152 article ideas—but hopefully, the things which make my voice uniquely mine will remain.
No ads, clickbait or other distractions. If you find them useful, which I think you will, I would love to have you stick around. If you don’t, I’ll unsubscribe for you.
Who it’s for
If you contribute to websites or digital products in any way, be that through sales, research, content or design (to name a few), I think you’ll find it useful.
In exchange for your email, you also get mine because I want to start a dialogue between us, which means you can press Reply and drop me a line at any time.
When does it start?
I’m changing the day from Sunday to Tuesday and with that the first dispatch arrives this Tuesday.
I’m keeping my current publishing schedule of 26 entries per year (excluding scheduled breaks) because it feels like a good number, whereas the thought of 52 sounds too intimidating—at least for the time being.
As a subscriber, you get the articles before anyone else.
A week afterwards, they will be published on my website and live under /articles, where I’ll include a ‘Listen to’ option.
I also have some ideas for syndication but I still need to figure out the details of this.
What will happen to the journal entries?
For the foreseeable future, I won’t be writing any more journal entries.
Longer term, I’m not sure.
I’ve been thinking about reducing their frequency to 3-4 per year, effectively making quarterly life reports but we’ll see.
Over the coming months, I’m going to go back and curate the old entries again, cutting out all those who don’t serve any purpose or don’t get as much traffic.
I’m planning on making an offsite archive of all the entries, including the ones that were cut in the previous curation because I want to keep an archive and progression of all the writing I’ve done up until this point. I think it’s interesting even though there’s a lot of shit in there and it means I can do full statistical analysis of the writing
Thank you
It’s okay if you’re not interested in where this next adventure is going to take us so if this is the last time I’ll see you I want to thank you for your time, attention and energy so far.
Thank you.
If you’re interested, I would be absolutely thrilled for you to join me for this next adventure.