Weighing Substack against WordPress
Me looking at this, it isn’t an exhaustive or comprehensive look. It’s a simple, casual, non-techie overview for myself.
I really gots to sort out this crap.
There are differences. When I started using WordPress, it was built on open-source code, freely available, and it had a “5-minute install” package. Cute, but also: really useful. From renting a domain name to spinning up a website, I could do that in less than 30 minutes.
Substack is more pointed towards branded content that exists out in the ethers of the internet-nets.
Both claim: own your content.
As a writer, that means I own my own copyrights. Steal from me and expect the wrath of, I’m not sure, maybe it will rain frogs or something. Get all biblical with plagues, famines, and crops withering in the fields.
Weighing Substack against WordPress
I subscribe to a couple of Substack newsletters. An author I love, actually, might be three or four authors I look to for entertainment and enlightenment, easiest via substack. But the way it works, it’s too limited, and there’s no permanent repository for previous material.
I’ve got archives that stretch back as far as 1993, and that’s just the horoscopic material online. Some of my earlier rambling is even older than that. It hasn’t been scanned and uploaded, and these days, I’m too distracted to care.
There are a couple of points that I need to work out. Part of this is the crutch of using a word-processor front-end that links directly to a WordPress backend. Near seamless and effortless.
In its original design, WordPress started out as a way to wrangle weblog content. The system metastasized into a page builder —slash— web page management protocol, but at its heart was always the weblog-style entry, a roughly chronological series of textual entries.
That’s what I do.
My biggest challenge with this question, how to store, online, the material that I’ve already got, what I’ve already done, archives, memories, dreams, images, and keep that alive?
Weighing Substack against WordPress
Getting kicked off twitter just brought about more focus to this question.
But wrestling the thoughts to paper, so to speak, in which there is neither paper, wrestling, or speaking going on? Typing it out, and thinking it through?
Once place. One copy. Post one place let the software take care of the rest — even if it means getting kicked off twitter for “inauthentic behavior.”
