Moving to Substack

I started this blog 18 years ago, as a second-year undergraduate philosophy major.  The first couple years were... very undergrad-y... but I think by 2006 or so I was doing some pretty interesting philosophy on here, much (but not all) of which I would still stand by.  The next few years (heading into early grad school) were probably the peak years for the blog in terms of audience engagement, commonly getting dozens of comments per post.

After the old blogosphere largely died off, and engagement moved to Facebook and Twitter, I've kept the blog going as a kind of "extended mind" for organizing my thoughts.  Sharing the posts on FB sometimes leads to some good discussion there.  And I get loads of random google hits through all the page-rank built up over the years. I've written over 2000 posts, received over 14K (non-spam) comments, and since 2010 have received over 5 million page views.  Still, the old Blogger software is no longer well-supported, so I'm curious to see if I can do better on a new platform.

I've heard good things about Substack, so have set up a new blog/newsletter there, called Good Thoughts. (The 'goodthoughts' substack url was already taken, alas, so I've gone with rychappell.substack.com instead.)  Existing email subscribers should be carried over automatically.  Others can click through or use the following form to subscribe:

Whereas Philosophy, et cetera was always primarily a self-indulgent project, my aim with Good Thoughts is to be a little more thoughtful about writing for an audience, e.g. writing more self-contained posts, with less reliance on back-linking to previous posts to fill in essential background, etc. We'll see how it goes, but I hope it proves worthwhile.

Hope to see you there!

P.S. For a synoptic view of my past blogging, check out the annual review posts under my 'compendia' category.