Joraaver Chahal

Writing for Whom?

Before this post, I didn’t have a “subscribe” button. Instead, I wrote when the mood struck. If I thought someone may benefit from my thoughts, or that person was the inspiration for my thoughts, I’d link him or her my post. I’ve written on Medium before, but I didn’t like maintaining a personal website and a Medium page. The Consultation and Testimonials pages are recent additions as well. Those used to be maintained via LinkTree, but the same feelings resurged. Thus, I consolidated everything under my personal website. One place, one brand.

The only sacrifice? No out-of-the-box subscriber list. I preferred the idea of maintaining a corner of the internet that folks occasionally came across (because I stand on the shoulders of the giant named SEO). They would come, they would read, and they would leave.

Recently, a friend learned I kept a blog, and, with I’d imagine an incredulous gasp (the conversation occurred over text), asked, “WHY DID U NOT SAY EARLIER?” To which humble ol’ me replied, “I write for me.”

This is a lie. I know this to be a lie. I wish I were so noble. Long ago I even saved a quotation on this very subject because it struck a cord with me:

“[You write out of the] desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, etc., etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive and a strong one.” — George Orwell

You the man, George. If I didn’t want someone to read my work, I’d go write in my journal. Instead, I sit here, thinking harder than I should about a collection of words, editing it again and again, with the hope that it may resonate with someone.

This book, collecting dust in my library, entreats me to be read, but with a gentler ambition than my initial attempts: one essay at a time. The fault is mine, the completionist that I am; eighty pages in and I haven’t picked it up since. It is my primary inspiration to write, but I always fight to craft the language that seems so effortless to those essayists. Some day my writing style won’t be because that’s all I know, but because I have chosen it amongst all I know. Till then, one must read more and write more. Although, Oscar Wilde consoles me:

“The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.” — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

I fear some friends may refer to me as “personally delightful,” hence my predicament.

Later, another friend asked why I didn’t use Substack. How ignorant she was of my internal struggle! Unfortunately, her writing is phenomenal. I aspire to enjoy her imagination with words, and I can only enjoy her writing courtesy of Substack. Quite the quandary.

The people continue to speak, and I must listen. So now you can subscribe to my work. What a glorious day this is!

Fair warning, I write on myriad subjects, including technical ones, which may be of no interest to you. I suggest you check the tags in the subject of the email to ensure a pleasant reading experience.

This section describes how I setup my newsletter, for the technically curious.

The setup was trivial. I only opened 60 tabs, investigated 5 different mailers, and spent four hours earning a quick bachelors in the subject.

1. Choose your mailer. I explored Mailerlite, Sender, and Mailchimp, amongst others, and compared their free tiers. My main interest was their contact list count. Mailchimp caps out at 500, which isn’t the best, but the others require domain verification and don’t have easy static site automation. So I settled with 500 contacts. I pray that threshold is tested.
2. Integrate a “Subscribe” button. Mailchimp offers a few options. I went ahead with an embedded form, and turned off JavaScript in my form, to keep my site as simple as possible.
3. Add an RSS feed. This is link is specifc for Jekyll powered sites, but the same logic applies for most static sites.
4. Create a Mailchimp RSS campaign. You’ll want to spend most of your time iterating on your campaign template, especially if you need it to match a certain aesthetic.

I hope you are enthralled by how I combined philosophical and technical details into one post.