If you have been checking this Conversable Economist website and wondering at the lack of recent posts, or if you had been signed up to receive posts by email and have been wondering where they went, the answer is that about a month ago I switched the Conversable Economist blog from Blogger to WordPress. The new web address http://conversableeconomist.wordpress.com. The 2500 or so archived posts from the last decade have been transferred over, too. All future posts will be added at that website.
The proximate reason for the shift is that Google made a decision to stop supporting Feedburner, which was the software that allowed people to sign up to receive emails about each post. There are subsidiary reasons for the shift, as well, but it doesn't feel worth getting into the minutiae here. I had been feeling for awhile as if the shift might be a good idea, and when Blogger started dropping features that were important to me, it gave me a nudge to go ahead.
At the Blogger website, I had about 3,000 readers signed up to receive an email of each post. Of course, I don't want to lose you. I think that the names of past email subscribers have been successfully transferred over to WordPress. But of course, there is also a hitch. Many email subscribers have mentioned to me that they like getting the entire post in their email--not just a link to the post. This is still possible! But to receive the full post in your email, you need to sign up for emails via WordPress at the new site. Overall, if you stop getting emails about new posts, please go to the new home of the blog and sign up there.
One final change perhaps worth noting is that I have added a "Donation" button at the upper right of the new site. Blogger has been free to use. WordPress is not particularly expensive, but it's not free, either. Also, the blog has been for an uncompensated hobby for me during the last decade. If you are in a financial position to make a donation, it would be a genuine help: in particular, it would help me stop thinking about moving the blog to a subscription model, and instead keep it freely available--which is my preference.
Thanks for following my musings as the Conversable Economist,
Timothy Taylor
