I started Notorious R.O.B. back in January of 2008. Back then, WordPress was more or less the state of the art in technology and I was extremely excited to venture into the world of blogging — something I had actually been doing for a while in political and comics/gaming space before 2008.
After over 15 years, over 1,500 posts, thousands and thousands of comments, thousands of readers over the years (and all of them among the most informed, most curious, and best audience in real estate), various new efforts launched then abandoned, I think it’s time I try a newer content platform that seems more in line with how people consume content in 2023.
So I am moving Notorious R.O.B. to Substack, the newsletter platform.
Much of the reason is that I’m tired of the work that has to go into maintaining a WordPress blog of this size and age. I have dozens of plugins, multiple pages, feeds for YouTube, plugin for handling webp images, sidebars, topbars, navs, designs, templates… and what was once super easy and simple compared to the CMS available back in the day (anybody remember Microsoft FrontPage? Adobe Dreamweaver?) has become cumbersome and annoying.
I don’t write as often as I’d like as it is; I don’t have time to mess around with updating databases and messing with proxy caches and such.
My hope is that Substack might be less flexible, but it should be easier to just write posts long and short (gasp!) that might be of interest to people other than myself. It seems to have most of the features and tools I need and want, including robust commenting, easy to use writing interface, etc. Plus, the direct-to-inbox email delivery with an actual website for posts seems like a better method of letting my readers know I’ve written something.
So anyhow, I have moved things over to Substack for now. This blog won’t go away. I’ll probably strip out a lot of the extraneous stuff and keep it as a sort of backup plus archives of 15 years of writing. But new posts from today on will be on Substack.
The new home of Notorious is: https://notoriousrob.substack.com/
Please come visit me there from time to time if you’re a casual reader.
If you are currently a VIP subscriber, you should have been moved over already with all of your subscriptions intact. (Plus a free month!) If you are receiving new posts via email, you should have been moved over already. Please let me know if you’re running into any issues; the importer tool is pretty good, but it’s far from perfect.
Also, if you’d like to be alerted when I write something new, please subscribe to the newsletter at the free tier here:
I look forward to continuing our conversations over on Substack.
Thanks everybody, each and every one of you, for having made Notorious R.O.B. a part of your lives for over 15 years. Now, make the new direct-to-your-inbox Notorious R.O.B. a part of your lives as we confront the Most Interest Times in real estate in a generation.
-rsh
