It's even worse than it appears..
Wednesday, October 5, 2022
I added a new feature to FeedLand today. There's now a white-on-orange XML icon in the upper right corner of each news product. Screen shot and example. The icon links to the OPML subscription list for the feeds on the page. This came from a question on the thread, basically asking "Where are the feeds." I love those kinds of questions, they help direct the development of a product. My perspective is so muddled, I've been living with this product for nine months already. I can't see what it looks like to someone seeing it for the first time. #
This is the OPML subscription list for the nbariver site. We could use feeds for a few more good NBA blogs (understatement).#
Last night on MSNBC, Maggie Haberman explained why she sat on some of her biggest Trump scoops. She says sources gave her the info on the condition that it can only appear in the book, not in news. The reason -- they wanted to postpone Trump's reaction to the leak to the future, knowing that the lead time on books is much longer than news articles. This is impossible to confirm, and it casts doubt on her integrity. The safest thing for her to have done is to leave the non-reportable leaks out of the book, to avoid the appearance that she's withholding news so she can make more money with the book. #
Someone in a J-school should study paywalls. A PhD thesis? Quantify what's going on and how effective (or not) each approach is.#
Jeremiah Moore: "In the past you could buy a day-pass for all news released by a given newspaper on a given day. Called 'buying the paper' it had a reasonable fixed cost."#
Substack has a sadistic kind of paywall. You start reading a piece, get into it, enough to wonder where it‘s going and boom, it’s time to subscribe or get out of here. Leaves a humiliation that’s hard to describe. This is the page that triggered the paywall, it's not doing it now -- I have no idea why. This is the second time I've seen this paywall. Anyway, I clicked on the link because I thought I might learn something, instead I have a pain in the gut. Trains you to never read anything on Substack again, and, like all other paywalls, it does not make me want to subscribe. If you have a comment, here's the original tweet. #
I thought the Turtles were silly when I was a kid, but now I'm listening to Elenore, and man it's really good. (And also silly.)#

Last update: Tuesday October 18, 2022; 11:04 AM EDT.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)