Lately I've Been...

Looking at Lake Michigan from the north, 3/22/26.

A couple of weeks ago I announced I’m going to begin de-emphasizing Substack posting in favor of my own blog, Zibaldone.net. Then I went on a roadtrip, had some family time with my daughter and grandson, and caught a cold; so I wasn’t making that much content. I’ve begun posting daily content to Zibaldone (which, in case you’re new here, is an Italian word meaning roughly, notebook, which I discovered in Allen Roland’s 2023 book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper). This new blog will consist of a new post every day or so as well as an “archival” post of stuff I’ve posted before; typically on Substack.

One of the things that bugs me about Substack is that it isn’t that great as a discovery tool. That is, if I return to the same topic (say, the Gilded Age, White Pine lumber industry, or Secular Radicals), there isn’t a great way for readers to bounce from the new post to previous stuff I’ve written that’s similar. I can make all my prior posts free to everyone, which makes sense since I have a very low level of contributing subscribers and have learned not to try to depend on Substack to pay my bills. But even then they’re free to read they are not that easy to find. Since the Zibaldone is a Wordpress blog, I’m building in Categories that will make that easier. You can find them on the righthand sidebar on the homepage, right below “Recent Blog Posts”. And I’ll experiment with ways to add links that point to connections I think are useful.

But another thing I’ve been finding is that my free subscriber count in Substack continues to rise. I think it would be unfortunate to just ignore people who have decided for one reason or another that my stuff interests them. I suppose some of the new subs are phony, although I think that was happening much more with “followers” than with subscribers, last time I looked. In any case, I think I’m going to use Zibaldone as my main blog, but cross-post some content to Substack. And certainly post weekly summaries of the stuff I’ve posted to Zibaldone, so people can be aware of the new stuff that maybe didn’t get cross-posted to Substack.

With that in mind, here’s a list of the stuff I’ve posted since returning from my roadtrip:

3/29: Nexus Book Club Meeting #2: https://zibaldone.net/book-club/nexus-book-club-meeting-2/
3/30: Exploration or Pedagogy?: https://zibaldone.net/blog/exploration-or-pedagogy/
3/31: How to Hide an Empire Book Club (links to all three videos with AI summaries of the things we discussed): https://zibaldone.net/book-club/how-to-hide-an-empire-meeting-1/
3/31: Infinite Alphabet Book Club (Both videos and AI summaries): https://zibaldone.net/book-club/infinite-alphabet-book-club/
4/1: Book Announcement: Anthology vol. 1: https://zibaldone.net/video/book-announcement-anthology-vol-1/
4/1: OER Retrospective: https://zibaldone.net/blog/oer-retrospective/
4/2: Book Announcement: The New Handbook: https://zibaldone.net/pkm/book-announcement-the-new-handbook/
4/2: Roadside History: Michigan Peppermint Country: https://zibaldone.net/roadside-history/roadside-history-michigan-peppermint-country/

I have a set of archival posts queued up to drop daily, and I’ll be trying to write new content more or less daily too. As Lindsay Nikole says, “the world has a lot for us to learn!” Ciao!