Tuesday, December 6, 2022

Blog Migration!

Birds migrate, butterflies migrate, whales migrate, and this blog is migrating! It's being moved over from Blogger to Substack. The URL is currently https://rationalistjudaism.substack.com but will hopefully soon also be accessible at www.RationalistJudaism.com. Hopefully the email subscriptions should still work - if you usually get this by email and suddenly stop hearing from me, please let me know!

10 comments:

  1. Very nice. Welcome to the fold. :)

    It is a nicer editor, and allows for subscriptions and monetizations. The possible drawbacks are:

    1) In the editor, be careful about cutting and pasting paragraphs with links from one place to the other in your draft. I've seen formatting disappear, which includes links.
    2) They aren't so good with SEO, and with being visible on Google. They used to have a sitemap.xml file that you could publish and make available to the google crawler. And there were other ways of claiming your site within Google Analytics to make it visible. But they keep removing those ways, and I'm not sure my own blog there is so visible. (The last thing I tried, yesterday, was putting in a Google Tracking pixel, but the directions online from third parties are no longer available, so I don't know if it worked. So far, nothing in Analytics.) One piece of advice is to harness existing websites (such as this one) to link to your pieces there, so that Google can find it.

    By the way, I just posted something relating to the luminous stones in the teiva, on my own Substack, here:
    https://scribalerror.substack.com/p/luminous-stones-and-peshat-in-midrash

    kol tuv,
    josh

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  2. Will the existing RSS feed still work? If not, will there be a new RSS feed?

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  3. Yes, it would be https://rationalistjudaism.substack.com/feed

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  4. You may run into trouble with Hebrew: Substack posts can be left-to-right for English or right-to-left for Hebrew...but never a combination of both in a single post. The odds are they'll add that feature sometime soon, but it it still a problem.

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  5. Mazel tov! Hopefully it will also give less visibility to trolls in the comments. I look forward to there being interesting arguments and conversations that aren't derailed again and again by the same users.

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  6. You sure you want to do this? The key feature of this blog is the comment section. This is 2022. The age of the "columnist" pronouncing from on high is gone. I'm not interested in reading bloggers who don't engage with readers, or who duck criticism by not allowing comments. I stopped reading Gil Student's blog, Hurhurim, years ago, when he went away from Halo-Scan, and I never bothered with Avi Shafran at all, for these reasons. That new location doesn't look very comment friendly. A few comments from sycophant's devoted enough to "register" isn't the same as an open freewheeling dialogue.

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    Replies
    1. I couldn't agree with you more- the comments (from all perspectives) have been a very large part of what makes the blog great, and commenting has taken a huge blow on the new format. I love reading the posts, but only comment when I feel I have something actually worthwhile to say, and I'm not registering an account for that purpose. But I do have something to contribute to the electricity on Shabbos post, and have now ay to do so without an account.

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  7. Does the new site have RSS? It doesn't look like it. :(
    I rely on RSS to see your blog posts.

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