Welcome to P O L Y M A T H!
Yep, I’ve just launched a brand-new site, and am so happy you’re here checking it out. I hope you’ll subscribe and find it worth your time. Continue reading if you want a bit of context around this new labor of love (and hate).
Future-proofing was my achilles heel
After writing ~3000 posts over the last ~20 years, and always ensuring that each and every URL still resolves correctly (across a number of different domains and permalink structures), I’m making a clean break and starting over.
I’ll always keep justinblanton.net around, but I’m treating polymath.net as an entirely new endeavor, and for whatever reason, I’m finding that quite exciting and liberating. 🤷🏼♂️
(I may eventually move everything over from justinblanton.net, but it’s just not something I’m thinking about right now.)
POLYMATH.NET?
As many of you know, for many years my one-line description on various services (e.g., Twitter, etc.) has been, “When I grow up I want to be a polymath.”
It will surprise very few who know me that I’d been looking at this domain for a while, but it was never available. When it finally did come up for sale I balked at the price, but eventually relented because, well, it’s poly-fucking-math.net!
Anyway, I just think it’s a great—and aspirational—domain name.
So what’s powering this whole thing?
I went with Ghost. I’d looked at Ghost a number of times since it launched in 2013, but always opted for something else over the years (e.g., Jekyll, WordPress, Medium (Anxious Robot), Movable Type, etc.). With the release of Ghost v3.0 and their fully-hosted solution, I figured now was the time to give it a go.
Don’t call it a newsletter…yet?
Ghost recently added native newsletter functionality, which played a big part in me choosing to use it for this site.
It’s not entirely clear to me yet how I’ll ultimately approach posts here, and I suspect it’ll change over time. I can see doing individual, longish posts, and also posts where I aggregate and comment on various external sites and articles (kind of like some of the more popular newsletters).
What about Substack?
Frankly, I wanted to use Substack, but due to “technical limitations” they don’t currently allow custom domains. (This is total bullshit BTW, because I’m aware of several folks who’ve been allowed to use custom domains with them. I’m sure they’ll open this up to the masses at some point, but I didn’t want to wait.)
I also looked into Buttondown and Revue, both of which are really solid, but, like Substack, their focus is newsletter-first, and as a consequence there were some elements missing from the web side of things that I wasn’t prepared to give up just yet.
Memberships
I’ve no immediate or even medium-term plans to turn this site/newsletter into a paid membership sort of thing, but I like knowing that Ghost can handle that natively if and when I decide to do it.
The design
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
—Einstein
That quote really does sum it up. This site is—err, will be—about content, mostly words. The rest is unavoidable chrome.
Let’s do this
Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll subscribe! I’m excited to get some of these thoughts and ideas out of my head and into yours. And regularly. 🖤