Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Category: Substack Updates

  • 20241012

    Things progressed yesterday to the point where I both finished up the last lingering draft post for the Lindahl Letter and recorded the podcast audio for it. That resulted in the publication of an actual Substack post for the first time since July. That is a good sign given that posts are supposed to arrive every Friday. I actually had some really good consistency on the publishing front and sustained a 3 year streak of never missing a deadline. That streak however eventually rolled up into a ball of failure and sat in the middle of the room to linger for some time. I’m already busy at work on my next research notes about quantum computing programming languages.

  • Learning the Ghost platform

    All the cool kids have moved from Substack to Ghost these days. The thought of moving from one platform to another for my weekly email newsletter sounded tedious. It seemed like a good idea to go ahead and move my nelsx domain over to Ghost to get things setup in the event I wanted to make the big move. The custom domain process involved setting a CNAME record and an @ record with your host. After that you just have to click a big button within the Ghost admin screens to start the custom domain process. It was not a hard process to achieve. The waiting for the records to update as always was the hardest part of the whole process. It’s a pure mystery of how long it will take the internet to actually update a record. Seriously, the update process just takes however long it does which is generally under 24 hours, but certainly not instant. 

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  • All that Substack drama

    Over the last couple of weeks, I have been following the drama on Substack and things are starting to become more fluid on that front. It turns out that the Platformer publication is going to leave this weekend and move over to Ghost. I did set up an account on the Ghost platform, but the setup is a lot more complex and involved than what Substack requires. I’m going to have to do some research about how the Ghost platform handles RSS feeds for podcasts as well. More updates will be provided on what I end up deciding. 

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  • Always building blocks of content

    This morning I spent some time working on content blocks for weeks 137 and 138. Some general research is underway for week 139 as well. Currently, three weeks are staged up and ready to publish. Hopefully, tomorrow morning that will be extended back out to 5 weeks of staged content. My plan is to finish up and record audio for two weeks of content. I’m still actively working to record podcast audio each week. It is one of those things that I have considered dropping from my routine a few times. It has even made my “stop doing” list a couple of times, but it is not really that big of a time commitment and people do utilize that content stream each week.

    It’s entirely possible that I’m at the peak of my creative abilities. I can sit down and write just about any block of content. Tackling even the difficult things has become easier and easier. Conceptually, I have it that 10,000 hours of practice threshold a few times on the writing front and maybe just maybe one of those threshold passes was successful. Knowing that might help influence what things from the backlog get tackled and in what order.

  • I’m still not sold on Substack Notes

    I’m not entirely sure that Substack needs to generate an alert in my activity feed every time somebody posts a note. I’m sure that note is deeply exciting, but I’m not going to click on it in my activity feed notices. That is just not going to happen. For the most part the Substack Notes area of the site did not really appeal to me in the same way that reading topical missives that are more produced does. I tried a few times to compose a few notes and it never really stood out to me. Maybe it will improve in the future, but as of right now I’m just not sold on Substack Notes. That is where my head is at on this one.

  • Pruning my Substack subscriber list

    Earlier this morning I was working on the 135th block of content for The Lindahl Letter and it seemed like a good idea to just prune the list a little bit. One of the best ways to do that is to sort the overall subscriber list by activity and then just remove people who have zero in the activity column. My list now has less than 10 subscribers who are not actively doing something with the weekly email that goes out. I have not had anybody resubscribe after the rounds of pruning that have occurred so far so it seems to be an effective strategy. They probably did not want the email and were just being polite about clicking that unsubscribe button. 

    I have considered setting up an annual subscription plan of a nominal $2 to sort of reboot the list a little bit, but have not elected to execute that strategy at this time. It turns out that Substack won’t really let you set up an annual subscription plan of less than $30. I’m not entirely sure what the minimum monthly plan cost would be, but I’m guessing it would be $2.5. That would be an equal measure of the yearly cost divided by 12 months in the year. A few online searches seem to indicate that the cost would be higher on a monthly basis. 

    Things are all set up to make the switch to a paid subscriber model, but I have not actually made that change. I’m going to think about it for a couple of weeks and make a decision.

  • All those backlog updates are happening

    I have started down a new path in terms of the backlog. I’m currently working on block 130 of 218 known blocks in the multi-year writing chain. All the things have been lined up to be committed to that path. That should end up yielding a pretty set of manuscripts and articles at the end of the newly minted 49 block journey. I’m going to go down the same format of yearly publishing a collection, but I should be able something else out of that process as well. We will see how that ends up going. 

    In any event, all those backlog updates are happening. The first two years of writing blocks were stored in a single Google Doc. Currently blocks 105 to 218 are being worked in a second Google Doc. It would probably be possible to combine the two documents, but I don’t see a reason to do that at the moment. It creates some unwieldy document problems when you start working with hundreds of pages in a browser tab. I’ll transfer the content into a Microsoft Word document for editing into something for publication as a yearly archival manuscript.

    It is interesting that my WordPress integration to Twitter no longer exists. This post could be shared out to other social media systems, but that will not be the case. No real need for that type of social media sharing exists. I’m actually curious if we will see a retreat from broader social media usage or if some other platform or communication method will spring up to fill a void that exists. Oh, immediately after writing this block of text I went out and paid for a year of Twitter paid features and then shared the post via the manual sharing option. Yes, I had to set up the manual sharing feature for every post to be able to do that and it took a couple of minutes. The only social sharing button option that I have added was for Twitter. That might change at some point, but for now that is how it is set up.

    https://twitter.com/nelslindahl/status/1665481416694456320
  • Content that wandered into existence

    Yesterday I ended up recording episode 113 which will debut Friday, March 24, 2023. This is the single longest podcast recording of anything in that entire series. It ended up coming in at 26 minutes of recorded content. I did the recording in one take. Yes, I was oddly proud of being able to do the entire recording in one take. While I’m writing this particular post we are sitting at a point where the next 3 weeks of posts are ready to go and will go out assuming Substack continues to exist. 

    One of the things that I did spend a few moments thinking about was if I should just be posting the content on the blog when I get done creating it. At the end of the year, I’m certainly taking the content and putting it into manuscript for publication. At this point however, I’m not posting it on both the blog and substack. They are for the most part distinctly different communities and I certainly could cross post the content. I’m not sure why during the course of finishing up the 113th week of content that wandered into existence

    During the course of my efforts this morning I looked at the next 5 weeks of content and started to sketch out how things were going to come together. Today could very well be a day where I have some time to sit and research for a few hours. We are probably going to watch an SNL replay given that a Kelce brother is hosting it.

    One of the other things to note today is that I have reduced my caffeine consumption. Today started off with one shot of espresso and a glass of water. Instead of having 2 shots of espresso the day has officially started with just one shot of espresso. This was a major 50% reduction in my daily start of the day caffeine consumption.

  • All that Substack content that arrives via email

    I’m not a paying subscriber to any Substack at the moment. During the height of the Twitter related drama that was occurring I did subscribe to Platformer for a bit. Earlier this morning I enjoyed a free post from a different publication and hit the like button and was about to add a comment. Unfortunately, they have a setting on Substack that presents me with a prompt, “Only paid subscribers can comment on this post.” It is of course followed by a suggestion to upgrade to a paid subscription to unlock the ability to comment. In this case the author simply won’t get my thoughts or receive any communication from me on the subject. I appreciate the idea that people could gain income from writing a Substack. Independent journalism and writing in general is always a good thing to encourage. Some of that output might not be very good, but that is how the great sorting of attention brings things forward and pushes others to the background. 

    Sometimes things that I write pick up a bit of attention and people look at them, but the vast majority of the content that I have produced over the last 20 years has been pushed to the background during the great sorting of attention online. That is perfectly fine with me for the most part. I’m writing for the purpose of observation and mostly for my own learning and personal growth. My methodology of processing complex ideas at times involves writing about it to work on advancing my consideration. 

    Throughout the last 2 years I have added 16 different Substack’s to my recommendations list apparently. 

    1. https://investinginai.substack.com/
    2. https://decision.substack.com/
    3. https://www.platformer.news/
    4. https://mindfulmodeler.substack.com/
    5. https://zetter.substack.com/
    6. https://brief.montrealethics.ai/
    7. https://dblalock.substack.com/
    8. https://techtom.substack.com/
    9. https://lastweekin.ai/
    10. https://garymarcus.substack.com/
    11. https://mikeelgan.substack.com/
    12. https://thegradientpub.substack.com/
    13. https://askwhy.substack.com/ 
    14. https://aboutchromebooks.substack.com/
    15. https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/
    16. https://joefattorini.substack.com/ 

    They all provide a variety of different insights to my email inbox throughout the weeks or in some cases months. They arrive at a variety of intervals. Some Substacks are way more active than others. My efforts for example arrive every Friday. That makes it a weekly Substack and it has pretty much always been that way. I know that the team over at Substack would really like us to interact with the content on the smartphone applications or in the feed as a collection of content. I’m guessing that most people still read and consume the content as emails either as they arrive or when cleaning out an inbox.

  • Working on taking some things from draft to done

    Things are starting to come together. Tonight I’m working on going from draft to complete on Substack posts for the rest of the year. Right now posts for weeks 98 to 101 are currently drafted. Completing that effort will get me to Friday, December 30, 2022. Getting to that Friday will close out the year and should also give me a couple weeks of cognitive break to plan and prepare to shift over into a new year of publishing. At one point, I was running a couple weeks ahead, but that did not last. 

    I have considered publishing each of the Substack posts here on my weblog as well. Instead of going that direction I elected to package all the content up and deliver a yearly published manuscript. Going with the publication based route seemed like the right way to go about it and last year it was pretty rewarding. Friday, January 20, 2023, will end up being the final Substack of the 104 week series. At that point in the journey, I’ll take all 104 posts and get them over to my editor before publication. On the brighter side of things the first 52 posts have already been packaged and edited with one complete cycle. I’ll put the whole thing back into the editing cycle. That seems like the right way to go about managing overall quality and continuity.

    Throughout the rest of this weekend I’ll need to finish up writing and ultimately record podcast audio for 4 different weeks of content. A task like that seems like it should be a possible thing to complete. Some time might be taken away from that task to watch the Kansas City Chiefs play football tomorrow.