The other day, I was missing the fluid workflow of my postach.io blog, when it occurred to me that perhaps the folks at postach.io reintroduced free blogs and didn't tell me -- or any of the other people who fled when the only options were paid blogs. I don't need this blog. The world doesn't need this blog. The lowest price of a paid postach.io blog was too expensive for me. But I really missed being able to jot down ideas in my favorite note-taking tool, Evernote, gradually work on them whenever and wherever inspiration struck (on my phone or laptop), and then mark them to be shared with the world by simply tagging them as "published". And I love that I can continue to refer to my posts, and even edit them, without any need for a network connection, knowing that my blog will automagically be updated the next time I sync Evernote. Aside from some formatting issues, this is exactly how I want my personal blog to work. These are things I write primarily for myself, but I want an effortless way to share them with the world, as well.

It seemed really unlikely that they would have re-introduced a free, bare-bones version of their blogging platform without contacting ex-customers. But I decided to check. I browsed to the public view of my personal blog, and it still said I had an issue with my account and needed to log in. This was pretty much what it had looked like since they pulled the plug on the free version. Undeterred, I logged in. I was delighted to find that my login still worked, and even more delighted to discover that I now had the option to downgrade to a free account. The only hitches are that I can run only one blog, which is fine for my needs, and that I can only use one of the standard themes. My favorite, "Penso", is still an option, so it looks like I'm all set.

Now, I'm writing this, to share my joy, and to test whether the service is still successfully watching my "Postach.io" Evernote notebook for notes with the "published" tag. If you're reading this, it worked!

P.S. I would gladly pay about $30 each year for this service. The current entry level for a paid plan is $50 per year, and I'm seriously considering going for it, just to support technology I love.

P.P.S. I did have to re-authorize postach.io access to my Evernote notebook. I discovered this by attempting a manual sync from the postach.io website, then reloading the main postach.io sites page, at which point there was a message saying that no notebooks were associated with my account. (I also received a friendly email from postach.io, explaining that the link with Evernote had expired, but I didn't see this until after I already had it sorted out.)