Hello everybody! Meg here. I wanted to send this note to let you know about some updates and changes here at Bridgetown Bites.

First, what’s staying the same:

• We will continue to publish news and stories about the Portland area food and drink scene on weekdays (and occasional weekends) on the website.

• There are no plans for a paywall.

• New post emails will continue to arrive in your inboxes. There may be a few tech glitches during this initial transition period, so thank you for your patience.

And, what’s changing:

• Judith Rich, who you’ve seen on here mostly in conjunction with Salad Week, is coming on as a more regular contributor.

• New post emails will, at least for a while, arrive in your inboxes soon after they publish early in the mornings instead of at 10am.

• We have switched to a new email/newsletter platform. Since the beginning, we’ve been with Mailchimp. Starting this month, we are with Buttondown. More on that below.

The Search

Recently, I had an experience with Mailchimp that indicated to me that it was time to leave their platform and consider an alternative. Those eventually included MailerLite, Substack, beehiiv, Flodesk, and Buttondown.

The Decision

I wanted something straightforward. I’m not interested in hosting Bridgetown Bites on another platform. I needed something with an RSS tool. I wanted something that was not bloated, and had great customer service. Buttondown fits the bill. Plus, their attitude about privacy resonated with me. Here it is:

“Your data is yours, your subscribers’ data belongs to them, and we don’t collect anything that we don't have to in order to do our jobs.” Read more about their philosophy on privacy on the Buttondown website.

I also can’t leave this section without offering my thanks to Steph at Buttondown, who has helped make this transition a very pleasant experience.

What Else?

I’ve been contemplating writing a weekend newsletter. Something that only takes a few minutes to read and has useful information in it. I have some ideas as to what it could contain, but I welcome hearing from you, too: What would you like to see in it?

Support Bridgetown Bites

We are developing ways for you to support the work we do here; a number of you have asked for a while how you can support Bridgetown Bites with your cold hard [digital] cash. One way will be through subscriptions to this newsletter. More on that to come—and if you have ideas and/or suggestions on this topic, I welcome hearing from you.

That’s it for now. I am grateful to each of you for spending some of your valuable time reading our stories and news.

Your friendly neighborhood Portland food writer,

Meg