Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sandal 4034 days ago
I actually may plan to do some feedback with cancellations in the future, but "you not publishing for half a year and giving everything away for free" seems like a pretty compelling reason to quit a service.

However, the main feedback I got from people (and it happened often enough where I'm convinced it was a common line of thinking) was that folks just weren't involved in Ruby anymore, or weren't doing a ton of online reading because got busy with other things. When the average age of our remaining supporter accounts is something like 3-5 years), that's understandable.

I've had two children since Practicing Ruby was started. Things were hard for a while. I wanted to quit the business many times, but left it in a zombie state in the hopes to do right by my subscribers sooner or later.

Now things are getting a little better for me, so that's what I'm going to try and do.

As for eBooks, I've thought about that 100 times. I would love to get some of the existing content into a nicely tied together collection and release it as an eBook. But it's a big enough undertaking where I feel it'd take me away from other more valuable work I could do.

If we get our cashflow situation to be even a little better where I could fund a couple days a month to work on that, I'll go ahead and do it. But for now, I only really can afford to fund about 1.5 days a week of my own work, so that isn't much to spread around.