33c was lookin’ a little 2008 so I thought it was time for a refresh. Same feel but with a little more breathing room for you, the reader.
I’m planning to customize 33c further to make it easier on your eyes and minds. While I try to live by Seth Godin’s imperative that we must always finish and ship, I’m afraid that this is a space that will never be done. As a reflection of how I am evolving, it will continue to migrate in time with my wandering perspective.
A few things to watch for:
Email. With Feedburner slowly circling the drain, I plan to distribute 33 charts to subscribers through Mailchimp. If you used feed burner through 33 charts, I have discontinued this and be distributing posts via Mailchimp on a daily basis just like RSS. If you are on my 33c email list and don’t want to receive posts in your inbox, just unsubscribe or find me on Feedly. I’m a firm believer in tight digital signals. If what I have isn’t what you seek, just unsubscribe. If you want to subscribe, just slide over to the sidebar and sign up.
Let’s get small. While 33c was sparse long before Medium decided it was trendy, I’m moving to a broader, cleaner column post with a ribbon header. I hope that the design keeps my copy and thinking front and center. The editorial design and syntax will remain deliberately clean.
Previously my sidebar was a shameless dung heap of self-promotion created as a desperate effort to sell you e-books and keep you mindlessly tooling around 33 charts. This will not change.
No comment. I’m suspending comments. While many disagree, I believe comments began their slow slide toward questionable relevance with the dawn of social. Back in the glory days, it was all we had. But these aren’t the glory days of blogging. Some of the reader input here over the years has been amazing, for sure. While I heart everyone who has commented and contributed, the value to the broader reading community doesn’t offset the maintenance effort, trolls, comment bots, and the repeated references to me as a technoutopian fascist. Feel free to comment over on Facebook or G+. Or take me to task on Twitter where I feel most at home.
Let’s focus. I’m working to find ways for you to access great stuff from 5 years ago. I will maintain various foci which will hopefully help you navigate my content a little better (see the menu up there to the right – I’m still refocusing hundreds of posts so be patient). These are like categories but they’re not static, predictable and lame. The foci will evolve as I grow intellectually and professionally, or as I randomly change my mind. The SEO experts tell me that this isn’t a good idea. But my greatest successes have come when I think about value for you, not Google spiders.
Experimental formats. I’ll be monkeying around with alternate formats including focused curation with commentary. As the human attention span continues its progressive involution, I might experiment with more frequent, shorter posts. I’d like to build a reliable and desirable email product but I’m not sure what that might look like. Let me know if you see something you like. Irrespective of how I pivot, I’ll continue to offer a generous helping of dewey-eyed navel gazing to keep my core readership happy.
A more horizontal 33c. I’m working to take the site broader than before to encompass the broader community of digital health and online medical culture. I’ll still cater to doctors but I don’t want to be positioned as a totally physician-centric site. There remain, however, active issues facing physicians as they go public. I’ll hopefully continue to serve as an intellectual center of community during medicine’s creative destruction.
For the geek set I’m running Genesis/Eleven40 Pro on WpEngine under the watchful eye of WordPress wunderkind Jesse Petersen.
Thanks for sticking with me so far. Let’s see where this goes. Feel free to send ideas to fox42 at me dot com