This idea that the primary way to get people to come read what you have to say is to push it to them, and that this is such an important goal that it justifies nagging them for permission to be allowed to blast communiqués in their general direction, and that you can excuse yourself for annoying behavior like this by claiming that it's for the benefit of people who want the email but wouldn't be able to find a sign-up field in a sidebar - presumably a small minority of a small minority of total visitors - strikes me as being so very entitled. But then, I suppose that the basic idea of the attention economy is that you're supposed to be clawing at every scrap of Whuffie you can get.
Granted, it's the author's website, and they get to do what they want with it. And we have apparently collectively decided that it's OK for any webpage, even one that contains only static content, to require JavaScript in order to function properly. A corollary to that would be that simply using the web is tacit consent to be pestered, since it's not really possible to have JavaScript enabled while also avoiding modern-day incarnations of the blink tag. So there's that.
But still. . . I'd love to see RSS make a comeback, just to at least take away the "but RSS is dying" excuse.
This idea that the primary way to get people to come read what you have to say is to push it to them, and that this is such an important goal that it justifies nagging them for permission to be allowed to blast communiqués in their general direction, and that you can excuse yourself for annoying behavior like this by claiming that it's for the benefit of people who want the email but wouldn't be able to find a sign-up field in a sidebar - presumably a small minority of a small minority of total visitors - strikes me as being so very entitled. But then, I suppose that the basic idea of the attention economy is that you're supposed to be clawing at every scrap of Whuffie you can get.
Granted, it's the author's website, and they get to do what they want with it. And we have apparently collectively decided that it's OK for any webpage, even one that contains only static content, to require JavaScript in order to function properly. A corollary to that would be that simply using the web is tacit consent to be pestered, since it's not really possible to have JavaScript enabled while also avoiding modern-day incarnations of the blink tag. So there's that.
But still. . . I'd love to see RSS make a comeback, just to at least take away the "but RSS is dying" excuse.