I'm setting up a new hardware arrangement. I'll have an old iMac on the left side of my desk and the MacBook Pro with the addition al LG screen on the right. This should give me a lot of screen real estate on which to do a bunch of things simultaneously. I have also duplicated my big Obsidian vault and renamed it “2025 Master”. Time to start weeding, though.
I'm also getting ready to start posting my blog on a Wordpress site that I own, in addition to on Substack. The advantage of Substack is that it aggregates a lot of blogs and produces a feed of them, that allows subscribers to see my posts in their inboxes as well as visiting my own page and seeing my recent posts in the order I posted them. And then to see some older posts that they would need to be contributors to access.
I don't think a lot of people on Substack are really that interested in reading my old posts. Substack seems almost entirely focused on what's new today. This is a huge advantage for people who are posting news or commentary that deals with the most up-to-the-minute happenings. Or who are posting serialized content where one item naturally follows another. Not so much when the connections might be random and chaotic. I don't think Wordpress actually lends itself to this, either. But I might be more inclined to edit and insert links. And also to allow people to see 100% of the archive. Rather than requiring a subscription, I could just put the "Buy Me a Coffee" link in the sidebar.
I don't think it's realistic to expect people to pay to read a blog. This was an element Substack used to attract bloggers: that there would be some type of peer appreciation and support in the form of subscriptions. But then they went and put the minimum annual subscription price at $50. While I understand it's expensive to process payments and Substack would probably lose money of people were running monthly subscriptions of a buck or two monthly, a full-on book generally only costs $10 to $20 new. So the idea that someone is going to pay $50 for a set of posts that maybe one day will get tidied up and edited into a book of essays (this was a typical path imagined by many authors) is a bit farfetched. It's great when people believe in you and want to encourage you to keep working—I certainly appreciate that from the people who've become contributors to MakingHistory and Lifelong Learning! But I also feel like I ought to be giving them more.
The obvious solution seemed to be permanent access to the archive of all my content. I don't think this lacks value, but my thinking about it has changed based on the difficulty Substack seems to have making it easy and inviting to explore people's archives. So I think I'm going to shift focus and stop trying to get Substack to do something it really isn't designed to do. I think the format is useful for alerting people to new work I'm doing and probably also to providing snapshots and limited-duration full views of new content. But I don't think it makes sense to try to make this the place where I expect people to be able to engage with long-term evolution of trains of thought across numbers of posts where I return to an idea and look at it from different angles. That's something I'll be trying to really develop in 2025, as a thing I can put out in a public space. So stay tuned for that.
An upshot of this is that I think that since it's such a chore navigating and reading it, the post archive should probably not ALSO be something people have to pay to access. So I'm going to turn off the paywall. I'm also going to NOT have a paywall in Wordpress, although I will invite people to Buy Me a Coffee. And I’m going to publish some digital content this year that’s complete, polished, and well-linked, and sell it like a book.
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