Detailed instructions for building a Patreon alternative

Comic book artist Karl Kerschl discusses web hosting, payments, newsletters. 

Here's the latest Super Punch newsletter

Featuring 10 stories I excavated from the first year of my site, my new favorite music, and the best toy I bought this month. I'll pick a subscriber in the next few days to send stickers to.

I just sent out my latest newsletter with my 10 favorite songs in 2023

Subscribe for free, and let me surf the web for you. And I'll be picking a reader next week to send free stickers.

I just sent out my latest newsletter with my picks for best movies, comics, books and food in 2023

Subscribe to save yourself some psychic trauma and let me surf the web for you. And I pick a reader to send free stickers every month.

I just posted my latest newsletter, including my picks for the best toys of the year

Subscribe for free and you might win free stickers.

The latest Super Punch newsletter just went out

Subscribe for a chance to win free stickers.

Sign up for the free Super Punch newsletter for a chance to win these stickers

Newsletter goes out tomorrow. Subscribe for a chance to win these stickers:

I'm proud to say Google has determined my site complies with Adsense policies!

In case this helps anyone else using Adsense/Blogger, I received a message about a week ago that my site would be delisted from Adsense because the layout (probably unchanged since 2007) had an unacceptably misleading layout (nonspecified) (and inexplicable). I requested a reconsideration, and was informed today that after further thorough review, the matter was resolved and the site is in compliance. 

(My genuine thanks to Google for keeping Blogger so dependable all these years)

(And don't forget to sign up for the weekly Super Punch newsletter. It's free, and I'm sending out stickers every month.)

If you subscribe to my newsletter and still want a Bluesky invite, let me know

(Go ahead and subscribe anyway, and maybe I'll send you a sticker.)

I created a free newsletter

The hiccup in the RSS feed over the last 24 hours convinced me to start experimenting a little--so I created a newsletter. 

For now, expect it to be a barebones weekly roundup that includes links I don't think have become too stale. 

Tell a friend!

Testing out embedding a post from Threads (here's a wallpaper)

Looks like you can access via a link, embeds sort of work, and images can be downloaded. It also looks like maybe my site doesn't like showing Instagram and Threads embeds at the same time--it'll either properly display the Instagram embed or the Threads embed, but not both.

Post by @pablo.rochat

View on Threads

Was my post deleted because Google is using a new moderation service for Blogger?

It instantly auto-deleted the post about the new Gundam Witch figure preorder, and I can't imagine which words or images in the post would have triggered such action, and have had only a handful of posts deleted in the history of the blog (mostly some very old posts a few months ago when a particular artist was pretty clearly trying to get old art deleted from the web to avoid AI scraping).

Anyway, a new Suletta figure is up for preorder, lots of facial expressions and accessories.

*Update: I clicked the link in Blogger to challenge the deletion, and it was very quickly republished...

Is it possible Suletta's crying face expression was auto-flagged as something else by AI image detection? I guess I'll leave that image up for a little while in case you're interested, and then delete it and maybe the entire post to be safe. But just speculating, since the speed at which it was deleted (and vague mention about the reason for deletion) indicates it was auto-detection, and very quick (but not instantaneous) reinstatement indicates human involvement. 

Google is ending Album Archive, but no one seems to know what that means

In a nutshell (I got the email yesterday):

It seems possible (literally… no one seems to know?) if Blogger photos would still exist untouched within Blogger, and this is just a weird extra indexing thing that won’t really matter.

Or if it is about to nuke every 2002-2010 https://t.co/xhbIu7r8d6, which would be… haha

— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) June 17, 2023

Presumably the thread she's referring to. (I mostly switched from uploading to just embedding images a long time ago, but I guess this might remove a lot of old photos from old posts.)

"I do think we'd all benefit a little from continued awareness that our websites are made by a few guys who may or may not suck"

From Brian Feldman's newsletter:

I prefer the web most when it's kinda messy and janky, and things move quickly inter-platform as opposed to intra.

...

Fundamentally, I think people are mad and freaking out about this because they have spent the last decade slowly ceding all of their creative power and infrastructure to some other guy. Everything's moved a layer or two up in terms of abstraction. Whereas a web user could once change an <img> tag, and font size, and page layout, and what happens when you click a button, they can now only get the instant gratification of changing the web by updating their profile pic on someone else's thing. 

Sounds like erroneous automated DMCA notices led to a longtime Blogger blog being taken down

If my blog ever blinks out of existence like what's described here, you can find me at Twitter.

A telling follow up to yesterday's post about what gets people to pay for a Substack newsletter

The first point:

you might have seen me posting these She's A Beast links and said, 'interesting, but it's patently unclear what I would be getting for my money.' Now I have laid it out very clearly on the About page so you have no choice but to understand https://t.co/cNEi2iUH5f pic.twitter.com/28vibCuTWG

— Casey Johnston (@caseyjohnston) September 17, 2021

Good post by a journalist summarizing his first year at Substack

From a much longer summary by Casey Newton:

Other than the stories I mentioned above, the Discord launch was the single biggest thing I did over the past year to convert paid subscribers. 

...

It’s been great to build a small community of Platformer readers and interact with them every day. Better yet, to watch them interacting with each other in friendly, constructive ways. And I was surprised when people I had never interacted with before showed up in my Discord DMs offering me story tips and advice. For these reasons alone, it has been a good project.

That said, I imagined it as a great, ongoing conversation between independent writers — a kind of public newsroom Slack channel — and that hasn’t materialized. There are two main reasons why: one, these writers are truly independent. Everyone is focused on getting their newsletter out, on spinning up a podcast, on a book project, on whatever. And so there hasn’t been the kind of regular interaction that I first envisioned. This issue was compounded by the fact that two of our initial writers — for excellent reasons, by the way — quit their newsletters within a few months of launch.

....

One other thing folks have observed to me: no matter the Discord server, every channel seems to be dominated by the same few loud voices. None of them are breaking the rules, exactly, but they tend to crowd out other people who might otherwise share their opinions. I basically have no idea what to do about this.

Interview with the teenage volunteer who generated so much traffic for Buzzfeed

NYMag interview:

I first started making quizzes during my high-school yearbook class. We had computers with us all the time and I would always get my deadlines done fast, so at free time me and my friend Katie would take quizzes. One day I actually realized anybody could make them and I thought that was pretty cool. I think my first quiz was in April 2017.

...

Is it fair to say BuzzFeed really encouraged you, as a community member, to contribute for free?
It always seemed to me that they wanted me to make quizzes, but now I’m getting responses [on Twitter] where people are saying I should have realized I was taking these people’s jobs. I never really got that vibe because they were telling us to make more quizzes.

You mentioned on Twitter that you feel bad and like you might have been a cause of the layoffs. I just want to tell you, and I know a lot of people on Twitter have been saying this too, that none of this is on you.
When I first read Matthew’s [Perpetua, formed head of quizzes and games at BuzzFeed] blog post I thought, “I’m that Michigan teenager. I’m causing all this traffic.” I felt a lot of weight on me. Luckily, people have been reassuring me that it’s not my fault. I really felt like it was as I first learned about the layoffs. I felt really bad.

...

I never knew I was the second-highest driver worldwide. I always knew my quizzes did well based on my dashboard views. Toward the end of the year, BuzzFeed actually sent me a package with some clothes and water bottles, a recipe book, and a coffee mug

If anyone has an idea of how i should contact Buzzfeed to talk about pay, please let me know!!

— rachel (@rachelmcmaho) January 30, 2019

"a LOT of the [Buzzfeed]’s overall traffic comes from quizzes and a VERY large portion of that traffic comes from a constant flow of amateur quizzes made by community users"

MP:

In the recent past, the second highest traffic driver worldwide has been a community user in Michigan who is a teenager in college who, for some reason, makes dozens of quizzes every week. It’s kinda amazing how much revenue-generating traffic the site gets from unpaid community volunteers. So, in a ruthless capitalist way, it makes sense for the company to pivot to having community users create almost all of the quizzes going forward. I understand math. I get it.

"The Walls Are Closing In"

Drew Magary:

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, I swear. When these here Intertubes came to prominence, the idea was that information would finally be free; that people would know MORE about this stupid world than they did before

...

That’s part of the reason I have spent the bulk of my career being a big snarky blog boy and goofing on traditional media outlets. Once upon a time, bloggers versus journalists was a very real and enjoyable feud. I definitely spoke about the blogging “community” as if it were a real and good thing

...

Yeah well, they were killed all right. The Washington Post, which only thrives at the moment because it’s owned by history’s richest man, said yesterday that over 200,000 journalism jobs have been lost since the turn of the century. All the old-school media outlets I used to goof on are going under, and not because of superior competition, but because they’re all getting eaten alive

...

Pretty soon, if not right now, the only factual journalism you’re gonna get will come from nonprofit groups, high-level access merchants, and anyone with a phone handy when shit goes down.

Everyone else will get wiped out. Misinformation will continue to flourish even more because it’s easy and because it’s profitable

Touch Arcade:

Apple Kills the App Store Affiliate Program, and I Have No Idea What We Are Going to Do.