Subscriptions!
An Archive of Our Own has, after much anticipation, reached a point where they can implement subscriptions. This means that AO3 users can set their accounts up to be notified when a writer they like posts a new story. (I have no idea if I’m likely to post anything before next Yuletide, but the nice thing about subscriptions is it’s no big deal if I don’t; you just won’t get notifications. I’m russian_blue, if you care.)
I’ll have to see how this particular implementation of the idea works out in practice, but man, I still want something like it for pro fiction. Obviously it’s harder in some ways to implement — the AO3 is a single database; a short story subscription manager would have to scrape updates from a bunch of different online magazines — but if there was a central service I could use to be alerted when short story authors I like publish something new, something along the lines of an RSS reader, I would sign up so fast my keyboard would be smoking.
But I wouldn’t know where to begin in coding something like that. So I sit here and make begging eyes, and hope that if I mention it enough times, the idea will spread until it lands in the brain of somebody who can do it.
