From the Compost Heap header. A pencil style illustration of a compost heap with flowers and plants growing around it. A bee buzzes by and a white rabbit hops by.

  • Refining my Online Ecosystem

    After trying out several different blogging and newsletter platforms here’s what I’ve settled on for 2025 (and hopefully beyond!)

    No affiliate links. Just sharing in case it’s helpful.

    Newsletter 💌

    This month I transitioned my monthly newsletter to Buttondown. It’s a paid service, but they do not take a percentage of paid subscriptions. The main reason I chose to move is that Buttondown offers RSS-to-email. Which means it can auto publish your blog posts as a newsletter! This is going to save me HOURS of formatting.

    Beehiiv almost solved this problem by doing the opposite. But the blog posts were always badly formatted with HTML garble-de-gook I had to delete. I did a quick test with Buttondown and the process is super clean.

    I’ve also been able to transition my paid subscribers who more than cover the cost. (I will say Substack’s AI Chat Bot made this as hard as possible, but Buttondown’s customer service is really helpful. Definitely a case of “you get what you pay for.”

    Blog ✏️

    After trying A LOT of blogging platforms I’m back on WordPress.org where I can have everything under one roof. I used WP years ago and wish I’d never moved away. There’s nothing like WordPress when it comes to robust blogging systems.

    I’ve set up a blog with multiple categories (Compost Heap, Zines, Photos, Scraps) and a tag system and I’ll be moving over archives one month at a time. I’m really excited to invest my time into my own website rather than pouring it out into social media.

    WordPress.org is free, but you have to pay for hosting. I’m using Hostinger and it’s too soon to recommend it, but I’ve found their platform easy to manage so far (versus others I’ve used and hated *cough* Bluehost *cough*.) I also love OnlyDomains for easy domain name registration and hosting.

    Podcast 🎧

    I’m also moving my podcast off Substack and back to Red Circle. Because I was an early adopter I was grandfathered in to a lifetime free plan so I may as well be using that.

    Moving the archives and show notes is a long term project.

    Which brings me to…

    Taking my TIme ⌛

    I confess that I haven’t made a clean break with Substack yet.

    At some point I might leave completely, but I may as well take my time with the transition. I’ve taken the nuclear option in the past and lots posts and regretted it.

    There are a few reasons:

    1. I have 172 posts that need to be moved. Many of them are multimedia and have elements that do not export and import easily. If you export Substack files and import to WordPress the photos don’t move and you have to do it manually. (It looks like they are there, but they are loading the photos from Substack’s servers.) It doesn’t even try to move audio files, transcripts, etc. So Self Pub 101 and Crowdfunding 101 will remain there for now.
    2. Anyone who has linked to Substack posts I’ve written will be looking for them there. As I transition out I can leave a breadcrumb for people to find the post on my website, but there’s no quick and easy way to do this.
    3. Since I’m staying for the reasons above I’m also going to take advantage of the “network effects” while they last. Maintaining Substack (my own and Neurokind) as a quarterly newsletter for my publishing imprint.
    4. Keeping a portion of my list on Substack keeps me under the 900 subscriber threshold (when Buttondown when the prices triple.) Anyone who hasn’t opened an email since moving off Substack was moved back into that ecosystem.

    Read more: Refining my Online Ecosystem

  • Back in the 90’s when we built websites we would often put “under construction” banners and GIFS on pages we were still building. This Lemmings one was one of my favorites. (Tai’shar to whomever archived these from Geocities.)

    Lemmings was also one of my favorite computer games growing up. Little characters (more like Fraggles than real life lemmings) would pour out of a trap door and you’d try to usher as many as possible safely to the exit. Each Lemming could have a job like digging or building or blocking unsafe areas.

    Screenshot of 90s Lemmings game. A row of blue and green figures walk across an indoor cave.

    So this little banner of Lemmings building a Coming Soon sign is super nostalgic.

    Over the last week my website has been “under construction” as I move from Squarespace to WordPress. By the time you’re seeing this the dust may have settled, but right now my domain name is in limbo. My site is kind of working, but my email is not. My shop is down. And I haven’t worked out all the design details the way I want.

    Last year I orbited closer and closer to old school blogging. I started a digital garden with Obsidian and tried the micro.blog platform. They were an easy entry, but I realized more and more I wanted my own blog and I wanted more control than any of those platforms gave me.

    So here I am.

    Bringing my various dragons home to roost.

    My intention is to carve out a space here to share the types of things that I used to post on social media.

    To own my archive.

    And do my best to future proof what I’m creating.

    If you’re doing the same I’d love to hear from you.

    Shoutout to GifCities of Internet Archive for the 90s style gifs.

    Read more: untitled post 636

  • “The act of taking notes in public is a powerful discipline: rather than jotting cryptic notes to myself in a commonplace book, I publish those notes for strangers. This imposes a rigor on the note-taking that makes those notes far more useful to me in years to come.”

    “Better still: public note-taking is powerfully mnemonic. The things I’ve taken notes on form a kind of supersaturated solution of story ideas, essay ideas, speech ideas, and more, and periodically two or more of these fragments will glom together, nucleate, and a fully-formed work will crystallize out of the solution.”

    Cory Dotorow on Blogging

    Read more: untitled post 156077616