Just a couple of things that you might want to know:

A few subscribers have asked about seeing nothing lately on the MacJournals-Talk mailing list, a high signal-to-noise mailing list we've offered for years to paying subscribers of MDJ and MWJ. Your mail client hasn't gone haywire - the list has been down for a few weeks. We mentioned about a year ago that we intended to tie membership on the mailing list to subscription status, because, sadly, the honor system was not working: people who were not subscribers (or who dropped their subscriptions) were continuing to use the mailing list for free support, sneak peeks at issues, and all kinds of other goodies - with resources paid for by subscribers, of course.

That had to change. Alas, the code work isn't going as quickly as we'd hoped - the list server doesn't get its addresses from the subscription database. We can modify the database to send commands to the list server to add and drop subscribers, but if the two get out of sync, it will confuse everyone. (Also, that would mean we'd have to disable manual unsubscribing to avoid sync problems, and we're wary of making you get list mail until one of us gets around to changing it for you.) We plan to bring it back when we figure out how to make it work for subscribers the way we'd always intended. (We really were surprised at the amount of freeloading going on.)

Also, as you may have noticed, with all the new systems and publishing finally in place (including this blog), we've raised the price on MDJ and MWJ for the first time in seven years. Oddly enough, MWJ's new price of US$14.95 per month is the same price that MDJ cost nearly a decade ago - for about the same number of pages per week. We still think both are a bargain at twice the price, and we'll continue to try to prove that to everyone.

Coming on Wednesday: public release of the 2005-2006 MDJ Power 25!