This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we talk more about magic links and building shelves offline. A light Behind the Blog today but we're back from the holiday on Monday.
JOSEPH: There has been a lot of response to our post We Don’t Want Your Password. Much of it supportive, some of it mad, some of it funny. The TLDR is (although I do think it’s worth a read) is that we’re four journalists trying to spend as much time as possible doing actual journalism, rather than spending our very limited amount of time building things that are not necessary and that we’re not equipped to do. We do want to build, like our big project for a fulltext RSS feed for paying subscribers and for the broader independent media ecosystem, but we’re not interested in using up resources (time, mostly) on introducing a username/password login for the site when the current magic link system works mostly fine and is how the CMS we use is designed.