Patreon and WordPress

Hi all,

This is just my periodic update for JoeBlogs members — mostly, I just want to thank you all again for your incredible support. It’s amazing, and so much more than I expected. As always, I have a whole bunch of things that are ALMOST ready to unveil, starting off with the Baseball Exploration Series. But they’re not quite ready. I guess most of you know by now that my ambitions always race way ahead of my realistic abilities.

But we’ll get there. I promise we’ll get there.

In the meantime, I did want to say a few words about Patreon and WordPress. These guys don’t seem to get along all that well, as you no doubt have seen.

This might be boring to you (it bores the heck out of me) but the way it works is this: There’s a special Patreon plugin I use that allows Patreon members to sign in and read JoeBlogs member posts on my site. When this works seamlessly, members should not even be aware of it. You should be able to sign in once and then, because of cookies (and milk and maybe a few berries), never again even know that there’s a pay wall. You SHOULD just go right to the stories.

Unfortunately, there are a few hiccups in the Patreon-WordPress integration, as I’m sure many of you have seen. The initial sign-in process is bulky and annoying. (Click all the traffic signs? What?) Then, you have to go BACK to the site and re-sign in. And then, sometimes you have to do it again even after you do it the first time.

And sometimes it doesn’t even work, and you get caught in an endless loop.

So I’m aware of all this (maybe there are other problems, too, that you can share with me). I have the Patreon-WordPress guru, Oz, there to help work through problems, but the awkwardness and blips remain. There doesn’t seem to be anything to do on that front other than hope the integration gets better.

On the other hand, there’s the Patreon site itself, which does have a blogging service. The problem here is different. As far as I can tell, the integration there works very well; I haven’t heard of anyone who has any problem signing in and seeing the content. The site does a nice job of sending the posts directly into your email if you want that. There’s a good commenting section. It seems pretty solid.

But, many of you have told me that you just DESPISE the reading experience there. This is obviously a matter of taste, but, hey, taste is exactly what this whole thing is about.

So what do we do here?

What I’m doing now is offering both options. I post everything on my site AND on the Patreon site. This is admittedly not ideal, either, for various reasons, but I can’t think of another way to do it for now. So, what I would say is this: If you prefer reading everything over at JoeBlogs, I will keep posting there and trying always behind the scenes to make the experience more seamless. There are various updates on the way, so I’m hoping they will help too.

But if you’re having trouble with JoeBlogs, please just go to the Patreon Posts page, and you should be able to read things there (or read them on your email).

Thanks again for being a member. More updates to come.