Today, I’m pleased to announce something we’ve been working on for the past two years: MacStories and Club MacStories are now one website. If you’re a Club MacStories member, you no longer need to go to a separate website to read our exclusive columns and weekly newsletters: everything has been unified into the main MacStories.net website you know and love. The subscription plans are the same. We’ve imported 11 years of Club MacStories content into MacStories, with everything running on a new foundation powered by WordPress; going forward, all member content – including AppStories – will be published directly on MacStories.
To get started, simply log into your existing Club MacStories account on the new MacStories Plans page or by clicking the Account icon in the top toolbar. Members can still access a special homepage of Club-only content at macstories.net/club or club.macstories.net – whatever you prefer. A few things will be different as part of this transition, and some parts of the previous Club MacStories experience haven’t been migrated yet, which I will explain in this story.
The short version of this announcement is that this has been a massive undertaking for me, John, and our new developer Jack. We’ve been working on this project in secret for months, and our goal was always to ensure a smooth, relatively pain-free migration for our members and MacStories readers. Now more than ever, the Club MacStories membership program is a core component of the entire MacStories ecosystem of articles, exclusive perks, and podcasts; it’s only thanks to the Club that, in this day and age, MacStories can continue to thrive with its editorial independence, vibrant community of members, and focus on producing high-quality, well-researched content written and spoken by humans, not AI.
The longer version is that the last few years have been complicated. We faced some challenges along the way, made some wrong technical calls, and have been working to rectify them – with the ultimate goal of propelling MacStories into its third decade of existence on the Open Web. We’re turning MacStories – the website that millions of people visit every year – into a destination that (hopefully!) will put a stronger spotlight on all the things we do. But to get to this point, we had to break a few things, iterate slowly, start over, and refine until we were happy with the results.
If you’re a Club member: thank you, and we hope you’ll enjoy the more intuitive and integrated experience we’ve prepared. If you’re not, I hope you’ll consider checking out the (many) exclusive perks of a Club MacStories subscription.
And if you’re curious to learn more about what we’re launching today and how we got to this point…well, do I have a story for you.
What’s Happening Today
As I mentioned upfront, MacStories and the Club are now a single website. That’s it. You no longer need to remember to go to a separate Club MacStories website to see what’s included as part of your subscription. You no longer need to go to a separate AppStories website and log in there to get access to the longer, ad-free version of AppStories+. Everything is here, seamlessly integrated into, quite simply, MacStories. Want to see what’s in the latest issues of MacStories Weekly, the Monthly Log, or the exclusive Automation Academy and Mac Hacks columns? Just scroll the main homepage and you’ll find those stories. Or, better yet, go to the special Club homepage, and you’ll get a filtered view that will show you members-only content that you can read in its entirety on MacStories. Want to get access to the premium version of AppStories? It now lives alongside our other shows at macstories.net/podcasts in our existing, but improved, podcast directory.
Essentially, we’ve taken three separate experiences – MacStories, Club MacStories, and AppStories – and integrated them into a single foundation that we’ve modernized for RSS, filters, search, and Memberful integration.
From left to right: MacStories Weekly on the main site; reading a specific article from MacStories Weekly; reading Weekly via RSS.
At this point, you may be wondering: why this, and why now? Didn’t we make a big deal out of creating our own custom CMS for Club MacStories just…checks notes…five years ago? Yes, and that was a mistake we’ve been wanting to fix for a long time.
You see, I’m very proud of the work we did in 2021 to spin off Club MacStories into its own website with a custom content management system, custom RSS feeds, and custom integration with Memberful and Discord. It was a lot of work, and a masterful exercise by our former developer Alex Guyot in willing something into existence that didn’t exist before. No one had a subscription-based website that supported RSS feeds for anything or the ability to turn newsletters into atomic units of articles that could be individually hyperlinked. Alex made it happen, and I’ll be forever grateful for the work he did. I’ll always remember those late nights, discussions, and plans very fondly.
Over the years, however, we realized that we bit off more than we could chew, so to speak. Creating a custom CMS is exciting and fun, but nobody tells you how freaking hard it’s going to be to maintain and improve for years to come once the initial excitement wears off. MacStories has always been a small team, and let’s be honest: we’re not millionaires. We’re not VC-funded and, to shamelessly paraphrase some guy named Walt Disney, we make money to make more articles, not the other way around.
Speaking for myself here, I’m content with the idea that MacStories is a well known, but niche, website that doesn’t attract millions of readers every day like, say, The Verge or 9to5Mac. I like what I’ve built, and 17 years into doing this, I still wake up every morning thinking that I must write more. But I also have to accept the reality that, since this is the life I chose for myself, I don’t have millions of dollars to invest into not just creating, but continuously maintaining, a custom CMS for decades to come. I didn’t get into this business to make CMSes, after all. I just wanted a blog. And then I wanted podcasts. And then I wanted a membership program. I certainly never wanted to think about databases and Kubernetes for the rest of my life.
And yet, that’s exactly what was happening behind the scenes between 2021 and 2024. We wanted to keep iterating on Calliope, our custom CMS, all while continuing to publish free content on MacStories and producing paywalled articles for members. That turned out to be very expensive, stressful, and impossible to manage as a small team. Very quickly, we realized that the original, utopian vision of extending Calliope to MacStories itself was never going to happen. We were stuck: we couldn’t improve the experience of the separate Club website fast enough, but members were also giving us their hard-earned dollars every week, so we had to keep showing up for them. We painted ourselves into a custom CMS corner, but giving up was never an option.
What got us “unstuck” was a simple, obvious idea: it’s always been about MacStories. This special place on the Internet that I created in 2009 and John and I have been curating and nurturing together for the past 11 years is the proverbial tide that lifts all boats for us. People come to MacStories every day. We’re lucky that a few folks on the Internet, indie developers, Apple PR, and other companies we work with know MacStories. The website is the place from which everything else starts. You know me, so allow me this analogy: you know the castle in Super Mario 64? That’s MacStories. It branches off in different directions and experiences. But at the end, you always go back to the castle. That was the idea that got us out of our rut and made us realize that, with one final push, we could rebuild the foundation of our business for the next 17 years.
So we went back to work. We hired a new developer, Jack McConnell, with whom we modernized the entire architecture of MacStories last summer. Then, we assigned him a much more challenging task: to migrate almost 11 years of Club MacStories (roughly 620 newsletters, plus exclusive columns) as well as AppStories (469 free episodes, plus 232 paid episodes of AppStories+) into MacStories. When you factor in that each newsletter is comprised of multiple sections, that’s literally thousands (roughly 7,000) of back-dated pieces of content that had to find a new home on MacStories, with a consistent format, rewritten URLs, proper metadata, and so forth.
You’ll now be able to read MacStories Weekly directly on, well, MacStories – plus, of course, email and RSS.
It was difficult. But if you’re reading this, it means we did it. We meticulously went through the databases of Club MacStories (dating back to 2015), AppStories (2018), and AppStories+ (2021) and migrated everything to MacStories while preserving as much of the original experience of each former website as possible. It was a lot of work, but it was necessary.
No database transition is ever 100% perfect, and I’m sure that there will be hiccups, missing features, and bugs along the way. We’re aware of some of the missing functionalities, which I will explain in the next section. But the good news is we can now move faster and iterate quicker than we’ve ever done because we’re relying on the popular, well-documented, mature, and extensible architecture of WordPress. We don’t have to build everything ourselves from scratch anymore. WordPress and the community of developers behind it give us a jumping-off point to add features at a faster pace while still being able to create our own enhancements that aren’t available off the shelf.
Case in point: you’ll still be able to read individual stories that comprise a single issue of the MacStories Weekly newsletter. By default, that wasn’t something that WordPress offered out of the box. We wanted to make sure we could retain what made the Calliope experience special: that our members could read both an entire issue of the newsletter as a self-contained entity but also open, link, and read individual sections of a newsletter. We had to recreate that from scratch. Jack’s expertise and the WordPress ecosystem allowed us to rebuild one of the key features of Calliope in months rather than years. The Memberful integration? Same idea: your account stays the same, but instead of having to develop a custom integration between our CMS and the membership system, we simply took advantage of its standard support for WordPress and extended it for our needs. You get the idea.
The result is what you’re seeing right now on MacStories: all Club content has been promoted front and center on the MacStories homepage, but if you’re a member, you can still read a dedicated “Club homepage” for just premium content. Issues of the newsletters as well as standalone sections can be read here, in our RSS feeds, via direct links, and now even featured on the homepage. Your subscription hasn’t changed; your Discord access hasn’t changed; everything has been unified, slimmed down, and made more consistent.
What We’re Not Migrating Today, Plus RSS and Discord
All that said, we had to make a decision about some previous Calliope features that couldn’t make the cut today, but which we’re working on to restore in the near future. There are also some RSS feeds that you’ll have to manually re-subscribe to.
Today, we’re missing these three features from the old Club website:
- There is no equivalent of the Explore interface yet to browse Club MacStories content with visual filters;
- There is no support for generating unique RSS feeds for specific sections of the Club. You can still get RSS feeds for entire issues of the newsletter, though.
- There are no real-time, as-you-type suggestions in the search box.
I want to personally apologize for not being able to launch with these previous features from the old Club MacStories website in time for today’s launch. I made the call to roll out a functioning version of our newly integrated website now and rebuild from here rather than keep waiting for months and continuing to deliver a fractured, subpar experience for all paying members. Our priority is to deliver these functionalities to members with our new foundation as quickly as we can.
With today’s launch, you’ll also have to re-subscribe manually to RSS feeds for the Club and AppStories+ (the paid version of the show). There was simply no way for us to migrate those old, custom, and member-unique feeds to the new website with the degree of simplicity and security that we wanted. I also want to apologize for the annoyance that this will cause to some of you. To grab those feeds, simply head over to the new My Feeds page after logging in here on MacStories and add them to your RSS client of choice.
The RSS feeds are still personalized per member and differ for each subscription level. If you’re a Club MacStories+ or Club Premier member, you get access to full-text RSS feeds for all newsletters and columns. If you’re an AppStories+ or Club Premier member, you also get access to the RSS feed for AppStories+, which you can add to your podcast client of choice. The feeds are uniquely tied to your account, so store them somewhere safe and don’t share them with other people.
Lastly, Discord. If you’re a Club MacStories+ or Premier member, you can access our vibrant, loving community of Club members who have been chatting privately with us in a safe, welcoming space for the past five years.
If you joined before today’s transition, you’ll still be in the Discord. There’s nothing else you need to do for now.
For new or returning Club members who’d like to hop on Discord, we ask you for a little bit of extra patience – we’re actively working with Memberful to migrate users from our previous system to the new one. As soon as that’s fixed, we’ll provide detailed instructions for connecting your Club MacStories+ or Club Premier account to Discord by clicking a button here on MacStories.
Welcome to the New MacStories
To quote a popular Italian song from the early ‘90s, “Some loves never end – they travel in vast circles and come back around”. I love this website. MacStories is what I do and, realistically, what I will keep doing as long as I have the passion and strength to do so.
Over the past decade, we’ve expanded MacStories by building around it: we launched separate websites for the Club and AppStories, and even went as far as creating a custom CMS for all of it. Today, everything is coming back to where it all started: MacStories. One website, one name, one destination for all the things we write, say, and experiment with on a weekly basis.
The MacStories you see right now may not look that different from yesterday. Under the hood, it is powered by an entirely new foundation – one that sets us up for the next decade and will allow us to write more, build faster, and make it easier for readers to support us.
Before I go, I want to thank all of you for reading us over the years and supporting the evolution of Club MacStories since the membership began in 2015. It’s only thanks to you that we’ve been able to continue growing the site and learning from our missteps. In a world filled with subscriptions, needless hype, and headlines optimized for “engagement”, we’re profoundly grateful for your attention, patience, and dedication to our style of doing things “the MacStories way”.
Thank you. Our new journey begins now. Onward.
