Membership signups is now live! Sign up if y'like!

Yahoo! I finished all of the heavy lifting behind Memberships late on Friday night. I set aside a lot of time over the weekend to test everything out and make sure that the integrations between the custom stuff on my site, Ghost's built-in membership mojo, and Stripe's payment processing were solid…

…But that wasn't necessary! My inbox started lighting up with notifications that readers were signing up. This happened despite the fact that I didn't tell anybody the stuff was live, and despite my incorrect belief that the Membership portal wasn't linked to anything public (and that Ghost wouldn't permit signups even if people found it).

Imagine my surprise and pleasure! I'd anticipated having this big, significant Moment today. My finger would hover over a button, and I would bless the event by repeating a line from a John Cleese anecdote from the night they recorded the very first sketch from the very first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. He and Michael Palin were waiting to make their entrances while Terry Jones and Graham Chapman performed the start of the sketch. He turned to Palin and said, "You know, it's possible that this will be the very first comedy program that doesn't get a single laugh."

So I knew that when I clicked that button that intentionally made the Memberships portal active and public, I'd be thinking "It's possible that this will be the very first member-supported thing that doesn't get a single paid subscriber."

I've been robbed of this highly anticipated bit of over-theatric negativity. And I'm glad of it!

It created an issue, however. I'd done all of the major, operational Membership stuff, but I still needed to attend to a bunch of teensy details. So this First Weekend group of new members didn't get the automated "Welcome and thank you!" email that hadn't been written and activated yet, and the posts that went to their Inboxes didn't have the right headers on them, etc.

But I'm relieved that it all worked. I'd set aside some time to work out why the blooming heck Stripe wasn't processing payments or any of a list of other potential issues. Didn't need to do any of that. I went for a nice long walk on Sunday. I saw a bunch of cool ducks.

So if you've been eager to help support this new site once the Memberships button actually started working, it's all working. Click away!

And even if you don't, I'm grateful that you thought highly enough of the stuff I was posting here to keep coming back. This site was awfully mangy while I was figuring stuff out and fixing things. You folks got to suffer through all of the bad experiences I didn't want to inflict upon the site's first "official" visitors.

So is the site officially open for business? Not quite. It's now 100% feature-complete and function-complete. This is the final part of the final stage, where I just metaphorically clean all of the lingering construction dust off of the floors and windows. I also have to go through a year's worth of old posts and weed out anything that doesn't make any sense.

That is: I'm okay with the stuff that doesn't make any sense, provided that I wasn't making any sense when I wrote it. I'm referring to things like status reports and other stuff that would have only been of interest to people following the development of the site.

Once that's done, I'll feel 100% confident to go around telling the world "Come on in, and check everything out." I just want to make sure they don't step on any exposed nails and that the exterminator really, really got rid of the last of the opossums.

Speaking of deliberately not making sense…obviously, I need to link the very first Monty Python sketch of the very first episode of Monty Python.