Returning to Blogging & Settling on Substack

For now …

It has been such an incredibly long time since I sat down and actually wrote a post. I’ve come up with plenty of ideas since I last posted well over a year ago (practically two), but why haven’t I actually written anything?

In the technology world that I exist in, Substack does not have the best of reputations. It’s yet another platform that’s going to steal your soul and your content while offending someone. To be allowed to publish your posts, you must absolutely jump through 17 hoops, and maintain a full git workflow with a CI/CD pipeline to deploy your static site. 

But you know what? I just don’t have the energy or inclination to do that shit after spending 8+ hours a day keeping services online for thousands of people. Occasionally, I just want to sit down and write without having to worry about some technical limitation somewhere. And I want to be able to do that from my iPad, and not need my laptop open.

For months, I have been trying to decide how to revive my blog and start writing again. Each time feeling some guilt for wanting to do that on Substack. Mostly because I’m a technical person, and I should be doing it the FOSS way, hosting everything myself. And every time, it’s stopped me in my tracks.

I’ve looked at so many options, tried out so many methods, but ultimately, there was always something wrong. For example, here are some services, platforms, projects that I’ve tested or considered in some way, in no particular order:

• Wagtail

• Statamic

• Publii

• Astro

• Ghost

• Bear Blog

• WriteAs/WriteFreely

• Hugo

• Medium

• Substack

• GravCMS

• Gatsby

• Kirby

• Blot.im

• Telescope.ac

• VuePress

This list is by no means exhaustive, and there are certainly ones that aren’t on that list that I recall trying, but can’t remember their names. Either because it was so long ago, or they have some obscure, bizarre project name that makes very little sense.

A Close Call with Hugo

I think the closest I came was possibly with Hugo. I discovered the most beautiful theme/template for it. It was perfect. Blowfish was precisely the style and layout that I had been looking for. I had even accepted that I was just going to have to use my laptop to build it out.

I spent a few days getting a local environment created using Hugo and Blowfish. Getting used to how Hugo did things. I went through many of the customisations, and read the documentation to understand what I could do with it. I also created some dummy articles to experiment before bringing in my actual content. Things seemed to be going reasonably well.

I’d even figured out a potential workflow for publishing from my iPad. I would continue to write my articles in Ulysses as I do now, and then use the PolyGit app to push to the GitHub repo, which would then trigger the GitHub Actions to build the site, and then deploy it. What an utter faff. 

I exported my existing content from my old self-hosted Ghost blog, and then rapidly realised I couldn’t actually use it. I spent a few hours finding a tool that would allow me to convert it from the .json file that Ghost had spat out in to Markdown. Despite their claim of the content being yours, working with the Ghost Exports isn’t exactly easy.

I ended up Ghost-to-MD to convert it to a useable format. Thankfully, there were a few options, but it did mean installing more stuff on my local device to be able to work with my content.

Once this was done, I dropped a few articles in place with images in folders and specific naming conventions. All looked good. So, I dropped the rest in. Live reload happened and a face full of errors. Mostly to do with parsing something within the articles. It just so happens that Ghost’s Cards make (or made, at least) a bloody mess of some things. That meant going through well over 100 articles and stripping out the mess around these cards so that Hugo could build the site again. 

That was it, I was done again, I couldn’t be bothered. I threw my hands in the air and surrendered. It was months again before I even started to consider giving this another go. It’s not like my waffle is that interesting, so why bother.

Back to it

So, months passed, and I convinced myself to take another look while I had some time off work. Various things are tried, but still, I keep coming back to Substack being the best option for my particular workflow at this time.

It’s simple to use, from any of my devices. And, while it would be fantastic if Substack had an API and worked with Ulysses to create a clean publishing workflow, it doesn’t stop me from copying and pasting right now. It also means I don’t have to worry about maintaining my server, the image/video/audio hosting, the bandwidth. I just sit down and write again. And I’ve missed it.

Could Substack go full evil? Absolutely. But at this time, I can export my content in a useful format, and they offer an RSS feed, which is so important to me. As long as they continue to offer RSS feeds of my content, I don’t think anyone should complain where I’m writing my content. It’s still going to show up in your RSS reader as it would before.

We shouldn’t shame people, or tell them that they’ve made the wrong decision because that’s what you think is right. It may very well be the right thing for you. But, everyone has differing technical abilities, or money to spend on hosting their services, or time to dedicate towards maintaining something. 

That also doesn’t mean that I think any of these other offerings are bad. Not at all. They are fantastic, and built by incredibly talented people. But, everyone is different, and that’s why there are so many options. So, thank you to everyone for making these options available.