After two years after writing a lot of content and giving exclusive access to site members, this past weekend I opened the site to everyone.

In short:

https://twitter.com/tommcfarlin/status/1198689233017430017

But this wasn’t a small nor was it a quick decision and it’s not something that I opted to on a whim. For those who were subscribed to the newsletter earlier this year, I made an announcement that this was coming.

I stated:

  • No new content exclusive was coming,
  • I would be refunding any recurring income while also continuing to give members access,
  • I would be opening the content later this year.

So this is something that’s been a long time coming and it’s finally done. And though I sincerely appreciate all of the support over the past few years, it was time for me to return to form, in a sense, regarding this site.

Further, it also allowed me to write a utility that may help other people in the future with a similar situation. I’ll talk more about that in a future post.

What About That Plugin?

One of the things I wanted to do when retiring memberships to the site was to write a small plugin that helped me locate all of the Restrict Content Pro shortcodes and remove them in a way that would cause the least amount of work to do so.

I considered a lot of different ways in doing this (and even talked to a few friends on some ways to approach it).

I did write a plugin but it ended up being useful not just for this but also for shortcodes of any kind that are bound to a plugin that’s deactivated. I plan to draft and publish a post about it soon then open the repository in which the code resides.

Maybe it’ll be useful. But that’s content for an upcoming post.

For now, I’d like to talk about why I opted to make a decision to do this at all.

Retiring Site Memberships

I had an outline for what I wanted to cover in this post but I’d be remised if I didn’t share a question that I received that helps to further frame this entire decision:

In no particular order:

  • I want to ensure I’m focusing as much time as possible on my growing family (we’re up to three kiddos now!),
  • I love what I’m doing for work and want to make sure I’m focusing on it and prioritizing it properly,
  • I want to return to form of how I used to write for this site which was under the filter of “a public journal of what I’m learning,”
  • The pressure to provide consistent, gated content for users was beginning to induce stress that conflicted with the above three goals.

The gist of it is that I still want to write but I want to have more control over it so that I can focus on everything happening in priority order without needing to deal with unnecessary stress.

For what it’s worth, it was a tough decision but I want to:

  • commit as much focus and quality on the projects on which I work as possible (including this site),
  • write the most useful code and content I can,
  • focus on my family and fitness (more on this in an upcoming post) as possible,
  • all the while doing so without needing to write just to fulfill an obligation that is self-imposed.

So this, along with retiring my newsletter, mark the two biggest changes to the site thus far.

And with that, I plan to return to form of this being somewhat of a public journal of sorts for the the stuff I’m writing along with the occasional long form on article on other topics.