“But Dishpit”, you ask, “what was wrong with your old platform?”
Honestly? Nothing. It was great. I could flex my skills as a developer and build and rebuild the site to my heart’s content. But after doing that for so long, I suppose it gets tiring.
Sure, making the move over to Substack and using my own domain on it might be incredibly limiting — but I’ve found myself at a point where I don’t really need to rely on my website as a portfolio any longer. And if I ever found myself wanting to showcase a particular new development for an extended period of time, I can just pin it as a featured post.
Also, having to keep up with and maintain dependencies is a tad annoying. Sure, there aren’t many (if any) security vulnerabilities I need to worry about when all I’m doing is hosting a static blog with NextJS, but boy howdy is it annoying having to open Contentful to write my post, then triggering a rebuild of the entire site. That’s not to say that it’s a long or tedious process, just a splinter-esque annoyance.
I think, finally, the other major benefit I receive from writing on Substack instead of on my own custom platform is the purported free marketing that Substack provides. They claim something about 40% of new subscriptions come directly from Substack — though I have no way to validate this information, it’s still pretty significant if it’s true.
I’m also going to use this as an attempt to start writing more fervently and with a somewhat higher frequency — my last post on the old site was back from October, if I remember correctly.
That’s simply unacceptable.