What For Pottery Daily Actually Does
Most pottery reference tools end up being either too academic or too basic. For Pottery Daily sits somewhere in between, and honestly, that's both its strength and its weakness. It gives you daily updates on glaze recipes, firing schedules, clay body recommendations, and technique notes. The idea is you spend a few minutes each morning looking at what's posted, and over time you accumulate enough reference material to solve problems when they come up in the studio. It's not a replacement for a kiln log or a proper test tile board, but it's useful background noise. The setup isn't complicated. You sign up, pick your preferences around pottery type and firing method, and then you get a daily feed. I'd recommend spending the first week just browsing without trying anything new. Every glaze or recipe you see on the feed doesn't translate directly to your kiln. Your clay body, your local water chemistry, your kiln's actual temperature curve — these all shift how a recipe behaves. Don't treat the daily posts as instructions. Treat them as starting points for your own testing. I keep it running on a tablet by the wheel. Some people clip the posts to a folder and look at them in batches. That works fine too. The difference is mostly about whether you want continuous exposure or focused sessions. I've tried both and the batch approach is better if you're the type who gets excited and fires something bad three days in a row.
How I Actually Use It Day to Day
Here's what For Pottery Daily looks like in practice. I'll open it and scan for anything mentioning a chemistry similar to what I'm currently working with. Maybe someone posted a magnesium oxide variation that caught my eye. I note the percentages, check the original source if they linked one, and then I make a small test batch — usually 100 grams of dry mix — to compare against my existing samples. That's it. No elaborate process. Thirty minutes max per post that interests me. The real value shows up when you have a recurring problem. Last year I was struggling with crawling on a speckled stoneware glaze at cone 6. I kept adjusting the silica and alumina and nothing helped. One of the daily posts mentioned a different approach entirely — increasing the frit content and lowering the calcium carbonate instead. I didn't expect it to work on my specific clay, but I ran a small tile strip anyway. It fixed the crawling on the second firing. Not because the recipe was magic, but because it shifted the melt fluidity in a direction I hadn't considered. That's the thing about For Pottery Daily: it doesn't solve problems for you. It just gives you more variables to consider.
Where It Falls Short
I need to be honest about the limitations because people who don't mention them are selling something. The daily feed is a mixed bag. Quality varies from day to day. Some posts are well-researched with proper citations and balanced discussion of results. Others are people posting a photo of something that worked for them with no chemical breakdown, no firing schedule, and no mention of their clay body. You learn pretty quickly which is which. The biggest issue is that the content skews toward common cone 6 results. If you're working at higher temperatures, or doing wood firing, or doing porcelain specifically, you'll find less relevant material. Not nothing, but less. And the community section, where people comment on each other's posts, can drift into territory where everyone claims their method is universal without accounting for local conditions. There's also a timing problem. The daily format means you miss context. A post about a glaze that worked might not mention that the person who posted it adjusted their kiln vent settings, or used a different kiln shelf primer, or that the glaze only works on a specific commercial clay body. Those details matter a lot, and they get buried or omitted. I've caught myself once or twice nearly adopting a full recipe only to realize later I'd missed a critical detail in the comments section.
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A Workaround That Actually Helps
What I do now is take a slightly different approach than most people. Instead of reacting to each daily post in isolation, I keep a running spreadsheet. Every time something catches my interest, I add it to the sheet with the date, the source, the key percentages, and a note about what I actually observed when I tested it — or why I didn't test it. Over six months, that spreadsheet becomes a personal reference database that's actually more useful than the daily feed itself. It forces you to slow down and evaluate each post critically instead of absorbing everything passively. I also cross-reference any For Pottery Daily post with at least one other source before testing. A recipe that appears in two or more independent sources with similar results is worth more attention than a single post, no matter how compelling the photo looks. This habit alone saved me from wasting about twelve batches of clay last year on recipes that sounded good but didn't translate.
Is For Pottery Daily Worth Your Time
Yes, with the caveat that it won't do the work for you. It's a reference tool, not a solution generator. If you're a beginner who's still learning the basics of glaze chemistry and firing, you'll get more value from a good textbook first and then use the daily feed to supplement what you read. If you're further along and just need fresh ideas or a second opinion on a stubborn problem, the daily format is efficient enough to be worthwhile. The cost is low, which is part of why it persists. Most people who use it treat it like a newspaper — read it, keep what's useful, discard the rest. That's the right mindset. Don't expect it to replace your test tiles, your notes, or your own trial and error. It's a conversation starter, not an authority. And in that role, it does its job reasonably well.
