If you’d like a daily or weekly digest instead of receiving each post as soon as Luisa or I publish it, that power is now in your hands! Here’s what they’re telling us:

After your visitors sign up to subscribe, they will be sent a confirmation email. In that email, they will click Confirm now. After they do this, they’ll receive all new posts and/or comments.

Subscribers can manage all their subscriptions and have the flexibility to choose between instant, daily, or weekly digest delivery options from their accounts. To do so, they can:

1. Go to WordPress.com and log in to their account if they haven’t already.
2. Click on Reader in the WordPress.com toolbar.
3. From the right sidebar titled “Subscriptions”, click Manage.
4. On the subscriptions management page, click the meatballs menu icon for a given site and select their preferences.

I think you’ll find that WordPress.com (via the Jetpack plugin for self-hosted sites like this one) does a pretty good job. A bunch of folks already read the site this way, having snuck in through the WordPress Reader, which I highly recommend as a hub for all the blogs, magazines and newspapers you follow. (Feedly is another solid option.)

One drawback with the emails is that embedded media such as videos aren’t shown, and that is the main thing that kept me from switching our subscription service for years, but I don’t post as many videos as I used to, so oh well. Links will appear in their place.

The other drawback, which a lot of web admins treat as a benefit, is that posts go out instantaneously, straight from the WordPress.com servers, and so we content creators lose the grace period we get with RSS to correct that one embarrassing typo that only appears after we hit the Publish button.¹ (Yes, I know, an old man complaining about the fast pace of things nowadays is nothing new, LOL.)

I do think WordPress.com subscriptions will continue to be free and work well for the foreseeable future, just because Substack is offering such a great competitive service.

1. One? There were two in this very post! ↩︎

For my more tech-minded friends: It turned out to be a problem with overly aggressive caching of RSS feeds by the plugin I use to cache and serve static files. (Beware performance-enhancing plugins!) So similar lag-times at Feedly and other feed readers should also now be fixed. Unfortunately for fans of my Pepys Diary erasure project, though, RSS subscribers will still have to click through to the site (or subscribe to the email digest) to see the actual erasures, since only the late, lamented Google Reader correctly displayed the sort of simple HTML formatting I’m using there.

Moving Poems will continue to publish next week in my absence, inshallah. And don’t forget to keep up with qarrtsiluni, as well, where my able co-editor Beth will be running the show.

This time we’re looking for words of power: curses, spells, charms, prayers, incantations, mantras, sacred scriptures, explicit performative utterances, oaths, or legal instruments. Submissions may consist entirely of such super-charged language, or may riff upon or explore such language. Submissions of visual art may of course take a more figurative approach to the topic; images of amulets and other power-objects, for example, would be welcome. But otherwise we urge contributors not to interpret the theme too broadly. Please don’t just send us a piece of writing that you think is powerful according to some subjective evaluation. We’re looking quite specifically for language freighted with mana and/or executive force, or writing about that kind of language. If you’re not sure whether something qualifies, feel free to query.

Please limit written material to no more than five items per submission, with individual pieces not exceeding 3,000 words. Please refer to the general guidelines before submitting, and note especially the recommendation to query us if we don’t acknowledge receipt within two days — occasional server hiccups and email glitches are a fact of life on the internet.

We look forward to reading your words of power with an unusual admixture of excitement and trepidation. This issue could be a real test of our editorial juju!

We’re also really pleased with the results of our first annual poetry chapbook contest. Here’s the announcement about that.

In the middle of life’s journey,
I found myself in a light-filled woods,
the path long since forgotten…

O.K., not quite what Dante wrote. But then, Via Negativa ain’t exactly the Divine Comedy. I am, however, currently exploring the circle of hell populated by malicious hackers and spam bots (which is why the comments are inaccessible). See you on the other side, I hope.

I’m suspending publication of Via Negativa (and curtailing most of my other online activities) due to a loss of internet service in Plummer’s Hollow. At this point I can’t predict when I might resume — it could be anywhere from a few days to a couple of months.

Thanks for reading. Take care.

I have been blogging elsewhere today. Because, you know, it’s my day off from blogging.