A few years ago I switched from writing a blog to a subscription email newsletter. The theory was that the email newsletter was more personal and a better way to engage with people who are interested in my work. However, I found writing the newsletter to be quite a burden. I felt I needed to have something interesting and useful to say, and it had to be very well written, to justify intruding into the inboxes of my subscribers. As a result, I only managed to send out a newsletter a few times a year and it was kind of pointless for both me and the subscribers.
Writing blog posts feels much less onerous. I can put these things out there and people can come to read them or not if they want. The stakes are lower and so is the cost of writing a blog post compared to sending out a newsleter. Hopefully this will help me to write stuff more often.
I expect this blog will mostly be about my professional interests – data analysis, visualisation, and economics. I’ve created a GitHub repository for any code and data that I use and will link to the relevant code in any posts.
I’ll share blog posts on Twitter and LinkedIn, and there’s also an RSS feed of blog posts if you’d like to follow along that way.