MattieTK

EmDash with some aggressive caching and SWR is effectively this, and we're getting closer to that every day. When the cost of maintaining the data part of the CMS is effectively free, you're basically working with a static site anyway.

I find it a little funny that their blog post goes into a lot of righteous detail on why they don't charge for address space like other providers and then on their pricing page they charge for you to receive or send emails.

Receive! Like the moment someone knows you are using them as a provider they would be able to DoS your account as no other provider charges this way.

This was written a really long time ago by a former WSJ Graphics reporter (Elliot Bentley) who is now at Datawrapper.

It is now operated by Muckrock and hasn't seen changes made to it in a while.

That's why it doesn't have any of these integrations, the technology just didn't exist.

I'm so mad about Slack removing custom themes as part of this update. Seems entirely pointless given the volume of themes they now provide, it seems arbitrary that they have limited your own choices.

This is highly reminiscent of the numbers game from the British daytime gameshow Countdown.

Contestants are given a choice of six numbers, from which they can choose how many big (25, 50, 75, 100) and small (1-10), and are then given a random three digit number. Closest within 30 seconds using standard operations wins.

Murdoch owns The Times" in London, not "The New York Times" (commonly referred to in the US as just The Times*).

In the US his holdings are the Wall Street Journal and New York Post.

But that's because the definition of a paper of record has changed, not because they no longer align themselves with the current definition.

By that traditional definition the only paper of record in existence today is the internet itself.

I used to work for a major multinational media company.

A few years ago the CTO at that media company looked to slash costs. They have a bunch of newspapers all over the world, and they had just acquired an Indian software development agency with experience in WordPress.

You can see where this is going.

Soon, a programme to launch WordPress globally to every publisher as their CMS.

But of course you would be allowed some flexibility. You could bring your own CDN if needed, you could bring your own frontend to read off the API, you could harness some identity management system for login, you could even build your own content store.

At that point "using WordPress" just became modifying Gutenberg. I feel sorry for the staff still there who have to constantly fight against Automattic's clear direction in building a Squarespace competitor, to build a tightly locked down and limited editor against the frustrations of the rest of the WordPress ecosystem.

WordPress is great, if you realise what WordPress wants to be, and don't fight that.

Yeah, sorry, that is what the world is like. It's a shame, but there's a way (as written in the post) that Apple could have accomplished something similar whilst still providing enough data to prevent the advertising arms race. They chose not to, therefore the industrial advertising complex will start manufacturing their arms.

And I'm sorry, but you are entirely wrong on your second point. Small publishers and newsletters are a growing business in media, many of them free (in order to build an audience from nothing). Blocking their opens from being recorded on what could be over 50% of recipients is going to cause them problems. They won't be able to measure their growth as effectively, they won't be able to get sponsorships as easily, and they won't be able to as easily judge as to when to go paid and ad-free.

Marketing newsletters are very different from the editorial newsletters that I'm generally talking about here. It's a shame they have to use the same technology, but the unsubscribe pruning is reader friendly, and doesn't prevent a smooth and reliable manual unsubscribe process.