A reminder: Publishing to a website is easy

Good. Feels like simple stuff — like RSS — is experiencing a renaissance.

RSS is the glue of indieweb, the open means of finding stuff and distributing your own content from your own site.

However, there seems to be this idea going round that putting your thoughts onto a website is difficult, which justifies using email as a publication method, or even not bothering with a site at all, and using a service like Substack instead.

It’s not. Sign up for a wordpress.com account, and you’re off: canonical URIs, comments, proper, editable HTML, RSS and syndication out of the box. It’s even had a send-an-email-to-create-a-blog-post feature for over a decade.

It strikes me that things are the wrong way round here. The starting point should be your website, and email is just another means of notifying readers when you publish something new. Just as you can offer an RSS feed, you can offer a subscribe to email notifications option. Again, this is easily achievable with WordPress.