OPINION
Tomorrow is the end of a short era of The BFD. The site was born in the aftermath of my stroke and was always supposed to be a temporary solution before we had a new brand.
Following on from the retirement of Juana, due to her terminal cancer, I decided to take the opportunity to do a complete relaunch and to change platforms.
This was done for a variety of reasons; one of which was to improve stability but also to significantly reduce costs, while adding functionality.
I had used WordPress for 15 years and it’s now very bloaty and clunky.
So, time for a change and with it a new name.
The name was chosen because of the positive connotations:
There is also an echo of the past with the old Whale Oil days.
So, from tomorrow morning, our new home will be The Good Oil.
When you get to The Good Oil you will see a number of changes. Firstly you will need to log in using your email address that you used on The BFD.
In the top right corner of the sight select “Sign In”:
Then enter the same email you use to log in to The BFD. Note: this is not your Disqus sign-in for commenting: that remains unchanged.
When you enter that, you will see this screen:
Click the link in your email and follow the instructions. Congratulations: you have now linked your membership and entered the site as a member. On the bottom right you will see a red circle. This takes you to your member account, as does the “Account” link in the top right. There you can change details, and subscribe to newsletters. (More on that shortly).
If you didn’t get an email, check your spam folder or, if you get an error and still can’t access the site, don’t panic. Send an email to [email protected] with important details like your user name and email from The BFD and we will endeavour to find you and get it sorted.
However, if you’ve used a fake email, you really haven’t made our job easy, so, it may take some time to get back to you. You’ll have to be patient because this is our first day and we are all busy.
Some of the changes are that we will no longer send out a Daily Digest. Part of the reason for this is we are ditching the expensive mailing system, that was also causing problems by regularly blocking our emails. The new system has built in email newsletters without the tech overhead and dramas.
There are some newsletters that you can subscribe to already in the system. Some are paid members only: you can subscribe to them but you won’t be able to read past a few lines unless you become a paid member.
Authors can request their own newsletters, but at this stage there is only one for subscribing to my articles by newsletter. Each time I publish an article, it will be sent straight to your inbox and published on the site.
Our Insight articles will now be labelled as the Real Good Oil. You will have to be signed up to see them.
There is still some membership work going on in the background, so don’t be alarmed if you don’t see Bronze, Silver, Gold etc in your membership.
PayPal members will show as complimentary, until we can transition those properly. Again, don’t be alarmed.
The new tiers are Free, Basic, Basic+ and VIP.
Paid articles are clearly labelled.
The paywall is a hard paywall…you can’t bypass it. From tomorrow onwards, my own articles will be paywalled for paid members only. If you want to read what I have to say, then you will need a basic membership or above. If you receive my articles via email, you will be able to only read a few paragraphs and then the paywall kicks in for the emails too.
If you aren’t yet a member, then please consider becoming one.
Once the new site is stable and we have completed the membership transition, then we will look at rolling out new features for members.
I’m exciting by this new tech and platform and I believe it represents a step change in our growth.
At this stage we haven’t got ads on the new site. I am thinking carefully about this. I’d rather have members than ads. Therefore the approach for The Good Oil moving forward is to be member focussed. Membership deserves priority, so you really should consider membership, because this site cannot survive on ad revenue alone and then where will you go?
Later tonight comments will be turned off The BFD as we transition Disqus to the new site. Tomorrow morning all our usual content will be on The Good Oil. I look forward to seeing you there.
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