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Monday, May 28, 2012

Don’t want to miss all the juicy news?

Here’s the easy way
By Will Collette

We try to publish between five and seven pieces a day in Progressive Charlestown – some we write, and some we share with you from other writers we find interesting and provocative.

Because we use a blog format where the newest articles push the older ones down the page, it’s easy to miss an article you might really want to read (whether you like what we write or not is immaterial). That’s especially true if you don’t check in every day because it doesn’t take too long before articles scroll over to the next page.

The easiest way to make sure you don’t miss any of our outrageous stuff, or our informative or public interest stuff, is to sign up for one of the free connection services, which you’ll find by clicking the link in the right-hand column that says “How to be notified of new articles.”


You can sign up to get alerts via iGoogle, Twitter or Facebook. Over 1000 readers use these methods to follow Progressive Charlestown.

I prefer the daily e-mail summary that gives you a wrap-up on the articles we published in the previous 24 hours. You get a summary, the lead-in to each article, our crazy choice of graphics and lots of links to get you to the rest of the story, presuming we get through your spam filter (check your settings if you don’t get your first e-mail the day after you confirm your sign-up).

It goes out at 3 AM. My colleague Tom Ferrio stays up every night to send each one out by hand to make sure it hits your e-mail in-box first thing in the morning.

It costs you nothing to sign up for any of these services. Unlike our friends at Oppressive Charlestown, we don’t screen out people we don’t like, as much as we’d like to. We don’t sell the addresses (who would want them?), we will never use them for anything else and really don’t pay much attention to them, since it’s all done automatically – except for Tom’s daily 3 AM chore.

When you sign up for the e-mail service, you get sent a final confirmation that requires you to confirm that you really want to receive the Progressive Charlestown daily summary and that somebody hasn’t signed you up to yank your chain.

Here’s a sample of what the e-mail daily summary looks like:


I’m very old school and don’t Twitter or Facebook or carry a smart phone, so I can’t really describe what our alerts look like in those media, but I’m sure they’re very nice. And very convenient.

You really don’t want to miss reading Progressive Charlestown. You never know whose name is going to show up. Could even be yours.