Initial Commit

Yeah so if after a year your email list is the same size it’s a safe bet to move on. Every single marketing tactic says you need to build an email list and maintain a newsletter to keep your readers engaged and network with other authors.

The issue with that is your readers aren’t just reading you. They are subscribed to thirty other newsletters and even with Substack’s app it can be hard to keep up.

It works great for my MOSFET Mag because it’s not a consistently updated site. I basically use it to store short fiction that got rejected one too many times. Using it as a magazine works just great. Other folks offer paid subscriptions and by all means do it if you can get them but I couldn’t produce paid-quality writing on a consistent basis.

When I was using Write.as I loved how easy it was to jot a thought in markdown and hit send. Substack uses a rich text editor, Wordpress uses some kind of div salad, and well - Twitter is just for shower/toilet thoughts.

Back to the old text-based blog format for me!

I’ve never made it this far with a static site generator blog. I attempted a Jekyl build long ago and gave up after too many failed installs - Ruby and I don’t get along apparently. But Hugo is pretty easy to use from a text editor. I’m currently using VS Code and pushing the updates to github who is hosting the pages.

I’m also kind of stoked to be going back to text-based blogging.