The Atlantic Sentinel had a facelift. On the home and archive pages, you now see post thumbnails and summaries instead of the full-width image and first paragraphs of the text. I hope this makes it easier to browse. The navigation, which previously moved to the left and right on large screens, has been stuck to the top and bottom. I’ve also tried to give the site an altogether more modern look with some small improvements to buttons and links.
The only casualty are the comments. I brought back comments a year and a half ago, but in that time just 35 comments were posted on 270 stories. I don’t think that justifies the amount of space the commenting form takes up. Of course, existing comments are preserved, but you no longer have the option to add new ones.
Please do keep sending me your feedback by email! Some of you frequently write me to share your thoughts on articles. I appreciate that a lot, so don’t hesitate to get in touch. Also if you want to share general feedback on the site. You can reach me at nick.ottens@atlanticsentinel.com.
Newsletter to Substack
The other major change is that I’ve switched the Atlantic Sentinel newsletter from MailChimp to Substack.
MailChimp is focusing on online retail and by now has 99 features I don’t need. Substack is made for writers, and it takes far less time to copy-paste content from the blog into a Substack newsletter and send it on its way.
I also hope that the move will help me find new readers. Nobody stumbles on a MailChimp newsletter, but Substack has many existing users and few newsletters about Europe. So hopefully there’s a niche.
Finally, Substack would allow me to charge for subscriptions if I ever wanted to take that step. I’m considering making it an option to enable you to support my writing while keeping the website gratis.
How to subscribe
If you aren’t subscribed to my newsletter yet, use the form below to sign up. If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, you can click here.
I’m also experimenting with a newsletter on LinkedIn, where I have 326 subscribers so far compared to 305 on Substack, although I imagine there’s some overlap. Let’s see which works best.