Hot Fudge Sunday and Fudge Factor

Okay, not sure if this is working or not, but we're going to monitor as best we can, and I'm going to see if I can find what I'm using to monitor. So if this is in fact working as expected, I should be able to open this in another device and see if it is working. Let's take a look if this is in fact working. Ah, it is working. Very good, people. So, uh, going back to what I was saying, the goal here is to separate out some of the properties I've been using for my newsletters. I've had a blog for quite some time. That was at fudge.org. I've also tried doing newsletters at various other places, and I have a knack for picking things that fail. I don't know what it is, but I get excited about a service, and then the service trades hands, gets acquired or acquihired, and then gets shut down. The first one was, of course, I used Revu, which was part of Twitter when I was still on Twitter before it became whatever it is now. And this is, this is no fault of any current ownership of Twitter. This was literally happening, you know, as Twitter was becoming something up for sale, I believe, in the timeline. But I put a lot of time and energy into learning Revu and all the little quirks it had and tried to do my best at maintaining cadence, but it was just difficult. I, I was not putting in the regular hourly commits to get it done in a timely manner. So fast forward, Review goes away. I immediately realized, oh gosh, this is probably gonna sequester my content. So I figure out how to sort of scrape it out as best I could and then get onto Substack, which turned into another challenge because the formatting difference between the two were not any kind of a It was almost kind of bad HTML out, bad HTML in. It looked awful. So I then took that as I needed to look at other formats that were a little more portable. That's when I discovered the notion of POSSE, or publish on your own site and then share everywhere else. So I've started writing primarily in Markdown, which is arguably more portable than putting a bunch of fancy HTML in and hoping that it's rendered the same way across different places. So at this point I have now matured. I started off, found another newsletter service. It was amazing. I'm still using it, still enjoying it. It's called ButtonDown. It's just enough. I've even got little Python scripts I can write to sort of pull all of my prior writing for a week, and if I want to do a digest, I can quickly copy-paste, or if I wanted to be really advanced, use the entire API to drive the whole newsletter simply by API, which would be phenomenal. That would allow me to just kind of write, and then once a week a script would come by and pick up everything and, you know, create an auto-digest. And if you remember the old days of Majordomos and other mailing lists, that would be more familiar. And then it occurred to me from feedback and others that the number of topics I was covering on fudge.org, or Fudge Sunday as I called it back by that point, It was kind of a little bit of everything, and that was a lot for people to take in. So a suggestion came from a couple of readers, "Why don't you find a niche?" And so I've done that, and the new niche is going to be called Fudge Factor. And Fudge Factor is going to go deep on the convergence of edge computing, AI, machine learning, and what's going to happen as we enter this new Industrial 4.0 age and what comes next. And then for the things that are more topical daily things, I had come up with a format for every day of the week for something called Hot Fudge. And Hot Fudge now is a daily. So it's, it's a paid newsletter. Don't have as many subscribers as I do free. This is probably not uncommon or inconsistent with how other newsletters operate, but it's just my newsletter. And each day there's a different kind of a theme. So Monday I look at markets, Tuesday I take on hot takes, Wednesday I try to find wacky things and random channels on the deep web. On Thursday, it's all about throwbacks. Friday is a sort of final thought, and then Saturday is a sneak peek, meaning sneaky and peak like the peak of, you know, inflated expectations, meaning on Friday coverage that people tried to bury things. And then on Sunday, I was going to do a free digest of everything that had happened in the prior week, and that would be the Hot Fudge Sunday, which of course is still a play on words just like the original fudge sundae. By having these two different properties, and by the way, they're both going to be powered by ButtonDown for email delivery. I'm going to use ButtonDown for all of the archives. I'm going to let it be Hot Fudge Daily will be 100% ButtonDown. I'm committed to that platform now for the purposes of doing a daily and a free weekly digest. And then for the longer form content for Fudge Factor, which will be around the convergence of everything at the edge, AI, ML, that will be primarily a, a blog format using Eleventy, which is a very opinionated way of doing headless CMS. And I'm using still an Eleventy excellent starter. And if you're curious, just go to the bottom of fudge.org. All the links are there to the amazing persons behind all those projects. But what I'll do is export longer form blog content on fudge.org, which is part of Fudge Factor. And then for things that are probably— I'm gonna really try hard to stay sub-500 words for the dailies. Fudge Factor is definitely gonna be over 500 words. I'm going to possibly get as high as 1,500 words, but the fudge.org updates, meaning Fudge Factor updates, will probably end up being monthly. I want to do really deep niche topical research, and I want it to flow down a narrow pattern. So I think I'll also probably embellish a little bit with the color on these video podcast formats. In this one, I'm using YouTube as an example, but I might consider going and trying out the LinkedIn version, which of course is based on Microsoft's services for streaming. But YouTube is also going to be converting over to a podcast format. So if you're not familiar with that, YouTube has obviously widened its aperture of all the things it does. Does this mean that I will do Shorts? I have, I have no idea. I'm getting my feet wet here. So getting this to work through OBS and being able to put two little browsers on screen to show what I'm talking about on the left, Hot Fudge Daily, on the right, Fudge Factor. That's about as far as I've gotten. But as my OBS skills mature, as I get more into, for lack of a better term, audio engineering— this is literally me speaking to my laptop right now, but I do have a Shure microphone set and other Shure microphones that I would love to bring into this environment to make it sound better. I think the audio is sort of natural right now, meaning that it's whatever the microphone array on this laptop is picking up. And I mean, it's an Apple product, so it's not awful, but I would argue that an actual Shure product, meaning microphone from Shure, would probably sound a lot better. And, uh, that's all for now. I, at this point, I think I've been streaming quite a while, so I'm going to stop streaming and exit and then go back and check this, uh, to see what it sounded like.