I have been writing this blog for over ten years. I am not particularly prolific; there are around 100 posts in total – less than once a month and sometimes closer to once a year. Apparently I only write when I have something to say along with the time to say it. For me, the latter is a bigger challenge than the former, and an early New Year’s Resolution is to smooth the way ahead.
Firstly, and perhaps less noticeable to anyone but me, I have moved from Squarespace to WordPress. Squarespace is lovely, but it’s a walled garden, often a little limited in what it lets you do, and the rent goes up each year. There is possibly a lesson here for science bloggers: it’s worth paying for a domain and an ad-free environment if you’re serious about your words – but I recommend choosing one that then lets you shop around for hosting. Huge thanks to Frank Wang and Jason Kemp for helping manage this behind-the-scenes transition.
Secondly, of course anyone who writes is hoping to be read. For almost all science bloggers, our writing is more important to us personally than to the platforms we use to propagate it, which puts us at the mercy of decisions made by the owners of those platforms.
Once upon a time, I could post a link on Twitter and Facebook to a piece I’d written and quickly see hundreds or thousands of clicks as it was shared and discussed. Today, that number can struggle to get well clear of the tens. This is not due to a decline in the quality of my writing (I hope!) – rather, it illustrates the extent to which platforms now throttle posts with outbound links in order to corral and monetise their readers, using their algorithms to steer people’s eyeballs in more lucrative (for them) directions.1
One bright spot for me is that this blog has come to function as a staging post for other outlets. The Spinoff, Newsroom and the NZ Herald have all published articles that began as posts here. More recently, BlueSky is feeling like old-school Twitter – a generous, fun and social place – and if its willingness to hold people loosely survives into the future, that will be a huge boost for independent communicators. You can follow me there at rjme.bsky.social.
The other big trend in the last few years has been the rise (or indeed, return) of mailing lists and newsletters, most famously Substack. Accordingly, my blog now has a newsletter version – which you can subscribe to here.
That said, my newsletter is hosted via Buttondown rather than Substack. I read (and support) several excellent Substacks,2 but I can’t shake the feeling that, sooner or later, Substack as a platform is going to sink into the same morass that consumed Twitter – and if nothing else, it is currently raising a lot of money on very little revenue, never a great sign.3 So I’ve decided to sidestep future problems by hosting my newsletter on Buttondown, a far more straightforward service – and one which gives excellent support, even on the free tier.
It turns out there is a name for this approach: POSSE or Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere – an idea I was introduced to by Molly White’s excellent newsletter. I’ve unconsciously gravitated towards this strategy over the first decade of my blog and I am actively adopting it for its second.
The last question about my blog is simply “why do I do it?” And that may actually be a post of its own. So what can readers expect in coming posts? I’m happy to take requests, but here’s a few items from my list…
- Science communication — why do it and why I do it.
- The limits of naked eye astronomy, and how that shaped the development of physics.
- Seeing the shape of the solar system in the evening sky.
- Moana (the movie) and the overall shape of the universe.
- Children’s books and the discovery of galaxies.
- The continued decline and fall of Twitter.
- The numbers of people on bikes in Auckland, and what we can learn from crunching the data.
- A recap of my own favourite posts over the years.
- Dark matter – has it already made successful predictions? (Spoiler: YES!)
- Academic freedom – where does it start, where does it end, and why it matters.
- Crank mail: what drives “amateur” physicists, and does it make them happy?
- What’s an excursion set, and why did I choose it as the name for my blog?
Talk to you soon.
- On Twitter, this is definitely happening – the number of views my posts receive fell precipitously around the time it rebranded as X, and I cannot be alone in that. ↩︎
- E.g. as a household we’re keen on David Slack’s More than a Fielding, David Farrier’s Webworm, Bernard Hickey’s The Kākā, Andrew Gunn’s The Satirizer, Mark Bregman’s Antipodean Musings, Josie George’s Bimblings and Anna McMartin’s The End is Naenae. ↩︎
- Anil Dash pointed this out on BlueSky. Substack has revenue of around $30M per year and only retains 10% of that; it is growing, but has a very long way to go before becoming sustainable. ↩︎