Over the last couple of months I have been investing time in the Substack community of writers Over the last couple of months I have been investing time in the Substack community of writers to attend events and meet people. It reminds me a little bit of the blog meet ups that used to happen almost 20 years ago where you got a bunch of people that were passionate about things and wrote about them together. You got really diverse mixes of people attending those events. It was the opposite of today where people are picking the topic and driving toward that type of content today where before it was interest in a platform that brought people together without a shared topic of interest. You had a naturally formed community of circumstance that existed due to the usage of a shared platform and a willingness to connect with other writers.
I’m thinking back to installing Movable Type on one of my servers a long time ago. Before using Movable Type I had been running builds via Microsoft FrontPage which was oddly the most fulfilling online development experience I have ever had. For a writer it was really nice to just produce content and hit publish. All of the complexity of content management was pretty much abstracted away. That admission might surprise you a little bit, but don’t let it fool you at all. My primary purpose of pushing content online is to support the habit of daily writing. Having to know how to work with cascading style sheets and other design elements was just something I learned along the way. All the web development knowledge that I have built up over the years is purely in service of the written word.
I accidentally set up a double Twitter post feature yesterday. Both the weblog and Tumblr are pushing links over to Twitter to share each new post. At the moment, I’m not terribly worried about this new feature, but I could see removing one of the automatic posting features at some point in the not so distant future. Why am I back on Tumblr? Nilay Patel shared a podcast with Matt Mullenweg that inspired me to get back on Tumblr.
I’m electing to share my podcast links via Apple Podcasts these days as it seems to be the most stable podcast service to share. It is pretty unlikely that Apple Podcasts will shut down any time soon. My guess is that a lot of consolidation occurs within the general podcasting space in the next 5 years.
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