Posted by Yesterday I posted a blog about how I am using AI at the moment (Talking to AI: Can I say bollocks?) and my subscribers might have noticed that the whole post landed straight in their email inbox. It landed in mine as I am now a subscriber to my own website to check it works and to see what it looks like, and it looks okay. So, I am viewing this as the official start of a streamlining process and website overhaul.
When I started sending this version of a newsletter two years ago, I’d just deleted my Brevo email account after getting fed up with specialised software that was far too clunky for its own good (and led to duplicating emails). I thought moving to a simple dedicated Gmail address was the “back to basics” solution, I was inspired by a newsletter to which I belonged and they seemed to handle it well.
And, for nearly two years now, it worked.
However the process was still: I would write a blog post, then I would write an entirely separate email telling my lovely subscribers that I’d written a blog post, so I was writing two things when one would do. It is comparable to sending a text to someone to say, “I’ve sent you an email.” Why send an email message to point you to the thing I want to say on my website?
Part of the underlying problem is my website itself. I have been here at ruthstalkerfirth.com now for almost 20 years which is mad really, so it’s a bit clunky in places. Last year just before Christmas, I migrated the whole thing over to WordPress.com and it runs much better now. But, I still have a whole plan to put into place. I do this, does anyone else? I make a plan and then generally it takes about a year until I catch up with myself.
So I am thrilled to say I am a tiny bit ahead of schedule on this plan, but behind on other plans, and as for real life, well I am supposed to be doing that right now instead of sitting here typing on my blog which is my favourite thing to do. The plan is to streamline some blogs, archive the newsletter with its own category and freshen up the site with a modern theme. It might take a while as these things don’t run as smoothly as I’d like. It’s on my list. This for me is rather frustrating, as I wrote recently about performative UX, graphical user interfaces (GUIs) have become so ridiculously overwhelming that I can lose hours learning to navigate a tool before I can actually do the thing I came to do.
Ironic really, because the whole point of WordPress was to make publishing straightforward: just write. And, I have blogged about how much I love WordPress since day one of this blog (WordPress January 14, 2007; WordPress groupie: blogging, fiddling, loving it March 18, 2007; Running two versions of WordPress; March 17, 2008 WordPress Multisites August 25, 2020 – and these are just the blogs with WordPress in the title).
And don’t get me started on all the other software which are promoting AI instead of designing good GUIs which follow all the principles of human-computer interaction about making software easy to use, easy to learn, consistent, transparent. And, most importantly easy for us humans to go back to and pick up easily what we or someone else did so that we can change them should we need to without trying to decipher the Rosetta Stone. Teaching these things as a lecturer seemed so obvious to state out loud that sometimes I felt a tiny bit embarrassed, because they are fundamental. Yet here we are in a time where all this wisdom has seemingly been forgotten.
Yesterday, I got email from Zapier with the heading: A plumber built 36 Zaps by talking to Claude. It is nothing to boast about that your software is so hard to use you need AI to do sort it out for you! Good luck updating all that plumberperson!
Anyway that’s me off on a tangent, but back to the main news today with my newsletter. Yesterday, I wrestled back a little bit of control and I’m cutting through the noise where I can. I’m stopping the separate newsletter and stripping back the admin so that subscribers will get a new blog post land directly in their inbox and then I can come here to write without worrying about the admin of it all. I may once I get the hang of the newsletter plugin write a brief note before the blog post like I would do. For nonsubscribers, I normally talk about the weather or the moon. I love the moon. It was a full Hunter’s Moon on Monday night (26th October) and it was bright and huge and exciting in the sky, and then the last two evenings it has been lugubriously hidden behind clouds. Though I got to admire it on my way back from the pub last night.
TL;DR In a nutshell:
The blog isn’t going anywhere. I’ll still be writing about AI, HCI, technology, digital anthropology (I wish more people would invite me to give that talk, it is so much fun) and anything else that catches my eye. You can always find everything directly here at: https://ruthstalkerfirth.com. T
hank you so much to my lovely subscribers for reading, following along, I really enjoy thinking about you as I write my blog posts. And, if you are not a subscriber signup! The box to sign up should be on the right-hand side of a desktop screen and at the bottom of the page on a mobile phone. Sign up to stay in the loop!
I am quite chuffed with this as I feel like I will have less duplication, probably a bit more GUI-wrestling for a while which I will document so that I remember how this modern day WordPress works now, and hopefully a bit more mental space in which to write.
Writing for me especially here feels these days like a form of meditation something which I thought about the other day as I was staring at this blog and wondering what to do about this double blogging thing for which I had signed myself up. And now as usual I am excited about writing that but invariably leave a placeholder saying – well that is a topic for another blog.
Once I archive the newsletters on here, I will shut down the Ruth’s Newsletter email account as I keep forgetting to log into it but since people rarely contact me there it’s okay. And, subscribers have a way to contact me directly via the automated Newsletter. So everything feels much lighter, much easier to understand, and more manageable which how I feel using any software should be. But perhaps I am just a bit old-fashioned with these crazy ideas of understanding exactly what is going on.
Thank you dear subscribers and dear readers at large, as always, I really appreciate you being here spending your precious time reading what I have to say. So to salute a farewell to the newsletter of old, I will sign off with my usual subscriber newsletter salutation for the very last time:
That’s all for now. I wish you a lovely weekend, my AIrrrrrrrrr crew!
Fair winds, me hearties!
Until next time,
Ruth