Cup of Coffee: January 17, 2024

Good morning!

We continue the shakedown cruise of the U.S.S. Cup of Coffee on Beehiiv this week. Here are today’s release notes:

• Yesterday was the first day I sent out a paywalled, subscriber-only newsletter. Unfortunately, a small handful of y’all who are paid-up Cup of Coffee customers were hit with the paywall and found yourselves listed as free subscribers due to glitches in the migration matrix which I have yet to figure out. Thankfully, though, it doesn’t seem like that many of you were affected. If you are one of those people and if you reached out to me about it yesterday, I fixed it last night and sent you an email explaining it. At least I think I fixed. If you are still having issues, or if this affects you and you haven’t reached out to me, please email me at [email protected] and we’ll get it sorted;

• For your information, the manner in which I have chosen to sort it all out is to confirm your payment information on Stripe — you don’t need to send proof to me; if I have your email address I can see it — see when you last renewed, and then comp you a gift subscription until, roughly, your old sub would’ve expired (I am rounding up to the next month in your favor). My hope is that Beehiiv will tell you when your “gift” ends and prompt you to renew, just as it does when paid subs end. If you’re one of those folks and I comped you a month or four months or eight months what have you and you’re NOT prompted to renew, please let me know;

• In yesterday’s newsletter I said I fixed blockquote and bullet fonts. Dear readers, as you saw yesterday, I did not, in fact, fix blockquote and bullet fonts. But today I think I did. You may still hate the serif font, but at least they’re all the same size now throughout the newsletter;

• As for that font: one of you said yesterday that it “looks like it came out of a typewriter.” Another one of you, in a totally different context, said to me the other day that they “refuse to give up the 20th century.” I’m with the latter guy, at least in most aesthetic respects, so I’ll need a more compelling argument than “I don’t like it” to consider changing it.

• Finally, you’ll see that, at the end of the email today . . . there is a button linking you to the comments! One of Beehiiv’s product people told me how to do it. I’ll note, though, that it’s a button I have to code with a link to each day’s web post, so there is a BIG chance that I’ll either (a) forget to do it some days; or (b) I’ll code it with yesterday’s post or something very dumb and Craig-like. If it happens it happens, and you all can mock me in the comments once you find the proper way there.

OK, I think that’s all I got for today. Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?

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