News & Notes
Ghosting Buttondown
Winning
I am, at long last, allowed to announce that “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers” won the 2023 Asimov’s Readers’ Choice Award for Best Short Story.
I’ve been sitting on this embargoed information for six solid months, so it feels a bit anticlimactic to me now, but back in February I was very surprised and pleased!
While “Hope” is no longer available online, I do have plans to rerelease it, along with two other out-of-print stories, in an ebook mini-collection. So if you missed it, stay tuned …
Ranting
So back at the end of last year, I had an attack of ethics and migrated Nine Lives off Substack.
After researching my options, I narrowed my backend provider choices to Ghost and Buttondown; Ghost was clearly the better platform in various ways, but in the end I picked Buttondown, because I am frugal and I thought I could get by on the $90/year plan instead of Ghost’s (yikes!) $300/year (plus tax).
And Buttondown people were super friendly! And seemed eager to help with tech support! And promised a lot of fixes and upgrades in early 2024 that I thought would resolve most of my difficulties.
Reader, this did not work out. Not only did Buttondown fail to address any of the back-end UI problems that made using it difficult, most of the front-end design issues that I had spent weeks of trial-and-error CSS-massaging to (partially) overcome last winter got overwritten and broken by some changes on their end.[1]
I ended up ignoring my mangled archives for several months because I was just too damned busy with the rest of my life to deal with the giant mess. This also stalled out my ability to migrate essays from Medium, which was how I’d planned to help bridge the several-month period when I couldn’t complete anything time-intensive.
Finally in early August I got a little breathing room, and so I metaphorically rolled up my sleeves and started digging around in the guts of things (yes, it was really that unpleasant) to see what was wrong.
What I found was that instead of fixing any of the existing problems, they’d rolled out a brand new feature — commenting — which … would be nice if it worked? But no! It was (is) so thoroughly broken in so many ways that I am just gobsmacked that anyone imagined for half a second that it was ready for client release.
A Buttondown developer responded to my lengthy support request — still very friendly! and eager to help! — but also seemingly unaware of the existence of any of these rather glaring bugs. He asked me for more information, which is how I found myself spending one morning testing and documenting the many ways in which the comments feature egregiously failed, most of which should have been obvious if someone had bothered to do the barest minimum of beta testing.
A couple of hours in, I realized that I was furious. Not only was I providing hours of free QA and UX design work,[2] but I was actually paying Buttondown to do their jobs for them. And I also realized that (based on how things went last winter) I likely had weeks more of this in front of me, with very little chance that things would be fixed at the end of it, or remain so for any span of time.
So I abandoned my reply to the Buttondown developer and started migrating everything to Ghost.
For the sake of my sanity, I need Nine Lives to not be a continual source of frustration and fury. I need something relatively frictionless, that — at least most of the time, in most ways — just works, so I can focus on writing and not all the technical crap. Buttondown has been very much not that.
Moving
I am hoping that Ghost will be what I need, because moving web sites and newsletters around is approximately as complicated and stressful as moving physical houses. So far it’s all looking a lot better, both on the front- and back-ends.
As a result of this change:
- Nine Lives archives now live on my own domain (ninelives.karawynnlong.com), a permanent URL that will never change even if (gods help me) I have to switch providers again.
- Without the extra friction of Buttondown’s bugs and design flaws, I should be back onto a more-or-less monthly schedule.
- It should be a lot easier to move my essays over from Medium now, so those will soon be available to subscribers as well.
- Comments now actually work! But only paying subscribers will have commenting privileges, because I don’t want to spend my time moderating spam and trolls. (Free subscribers can always contact me by replying to any newsletter.)
Asking
Jak often tells me that I should value my time more — and he’s undoubtedly right, but it’s not that easy for me.
For him it’s simple: he has a job where he makes an hourly wage, and so he just carries that number around as though every hour he’s awake is equivalent. I, on the other hand, have the classic ‘invisible labor’ problem: I work long hours, often seven days a week, but I rarely get paid actual money for anything I do. This not only reinforces my tendency to extreme frugality, but also makes it very difficult for me to equate my time with any amount of money at all.
If I were to actually track the hours I’ve spent thus far on Nine Lives and calculate my hourly profit, it would be pennies at best … and that’s before the new $327 bill for Ghost. There’s a big part of me that thinks: well, pennies must be all my time and effort is worth. I can believe that my writing is good, and that my insights are “valuable” in the abstract, without expecting anyone to pay me for them.
My little socialist heart is just deeply uncomfortable with this whole asking-for-money thing … but I’m going to do it anyway, because I need to improve the sustainability of this situation.
If you regularly read Nine Lives and can afford just $48 (USD) a year — please become a Member.[3] If you only occasionally read Nine Lives or can’t afford $48, please leave me a tip. Every little bit helps me keep this going.[4]
I’ve also added a “bookshop” to the site, which allows me to earn affiliate payments on books I’ve recommended. (I chose Bookshop as an ethical alternative to Amazon; it’s where I buy my own books now.)
Replying
Because the bugs in Buttondown left comments to “Preparing for the Next Market Crash” unseen and unanswered for a long time — and the comments themselves are disappearing in the migration to Ghost — I’m going to put replies here instead.