Before blogging and the web, there was email and Usenet and FTP sites.
Just over 29 years ago I started writing online, sending out literal undergraduate humour to mates at Monash University and beyond mostly via email, under the truly ridiculous name “Toxic Custard“.
It got into the student newspaper, then in 1996 it went onto the web and became the early version of this blog. Along the way the content has continued to morph, to more autobiographical material, and more recently a concentration on transport.
The email list still exists… and to my surprise it’s still got about 600 people on it.
But I’m shutting it down – because it requires manual intervention to crank it up and send it out, which I rarely get around to doing, and because it relies on YahooGroups, which recently announced most of its features are being shut down. Emails to lists will be the only thing left, but it’s probably pretty safe to say these won’t last much longer. It’s obviously not a business Yahoo wants to be in anymore.
Edit: In classic Yahoo style, the final email to the list took almost 24 hours to be delivered.
The blog will keep going. Those wanting to receive posts by email have a couple of options:
Subscribe to all posts – I’ll be sending out invitations to this to those on the old list.
…or you can subscribe to just transport posts (via MailChimp):
There are also options to get new posts via RSS feeders (just add this URL), and I promote most of them via Twitter and Facebook. Edit: Of course you can just read it on the web.
I also occasionally blog on technology and various geeky tidbits at geekrant.org
Thanks to all who stayed on the email list over the years.
