Hello, Substack!
Thanks for all the fish, Pelican!
In the past couple of months I’ve been improving my blog quite a lot. I realized, that I would prefer a no fuss solution rather than tinkering for this particular instance. But where to go?
In the case we don’t know each other, welcome! I enjoy tinkering with IT security related projects and ideas and I particularly enjoy writing about them. Take a look at some of the older articles:
The Old Ways
When I started writing, I didn’t care much about things. I wanted to try things out and experiment. So I did what was easiest for me at the time - grabbed a static site generator named Pelican, tweaked a theme a bit and off I went.
I’ve deployed the site to Netlify - it was easy and it was free! What more could I ask for? Well, turns out, that quite a lot. I’ve started to integrate more random services and extensions into my site - Mailjet, Umami, highlight.js … Of course, there were more plans. Plans that take time and effort both in creating and in maintaining.
Why Substack?
I realized how hard is to create a pretty website. However, I knew I wasn’t looking for the full options that your custom website provides you, so I started shopping for a platform.
Moreover, getting visitors to your custom site in this day and age is hard. Like, stupidly hard. It took months before my own site was at first page of Google results for my own name! Granted, I am no SEO guru, but still, I needed help. Substack social features as well as a great name is one of the benefits I look forward to.
I was looking for a platform where I can still control the content. That means the ability to migrate away from Substack if needed. The option of providing your own domain and setting your own links without IDs and the rest is the killer feature for me.
Then all you have to do to retain control over the links is to keep the domain and implement a simple Nginx redirector. You can stay confident that your content will stay accessible no matter the platform.
I was also pleasantly surprised by the migration process. It went smoothly, with the only hiccup being the tables in articles. Did you know Substack has a hidden Datawrapper integration? Just paste the link and it draws it. I struggled with dark mode a bit, but in the end I’ve selected a compromise that is legible no matter what colors are there. I expect similar flow with syntax highlighting.
Onwards and forwards!
Right now, I’ve got a couple ideas on what to do as well as some ideas already ready (spoilers: Advent is coming). I am not fully commited to Substack yet, and that’s a good thing. It’s a writing platform, not a wife. Let’s see how this goes.
Have a good one!