Wow, just realized it passed its 21st anniversary last month. A few iterations throughout the years, but the current form is basically 13-ish years old, regularly updated.
If this is what you actually do for a living, and have done for any substantial amount of time, I have to congratulate you for reminding me what envy feels like.
And if your real job is something more mainstream and this is just a side project, then I have to congratulate you for making it look like you have had all the time in the world to put into it.
But above all that I'm just happy that something like this exists, it feels like what the web should have grown into more broadly, back when it looked like everyone was going to make their mark on the world by meticuloudly curating something interesting about themselves to share with the rest of us.
Substack does suffer from the same potential terminal illness as Medium: An extremely high valuation relative to addressable market. I think both businesses were good low hundred-million-dollar businesses. Medium never found a way to justify their ~$1B cap. Substack's current valuation is currently $650M based on recent funding.
Substack seems to have fostered a pretty good commenting environment for the little I've seen. Especially from authors like George Saunders writing non-political / education-focused "newsletters" (i.e., blogs). In part, this seems to be because of forced login, and the fact that you have a single, shared identity for all publications on the platform (thereby increasing the value of … civility?). But also, of course, the commenters are often limited to paying subscribers, so they are all on the "same team" as it were in a way public, completely open blogs / articles aren't.
Fwiw - paying for YouTube premium removes all ads from all devices and I see it as a strong vote in favor of subscriptions that do so. But, yes, it’s nearly unwatchable in its free state.
Do not subscribe to YouTube Premium. The whole thing just makes the problem worse by still allowing ads and requiring you to log in using an account that is also tied to your real world identity (for payment processing). You just end up giving more data points to Google to track and don't get rid of all ads.
I would recommend poking around with 11ty,[0] which I find to be significantly simpler than Hugo.
The Go templating of Hugo is extremely confusing for most non-Go people. After using it for years I still constantly look up how to do simple conditionals.
11ty is a very competent, "good enough" generator. We used it to build this site[1] for CERN back in 2019 from scratch over the course of a few days.
Yes, Go templating is quite hard. There was a feature request[1] to implement the Django/Jinja2-like Pongo2 template engine[2], but got rejected because it would have been a too big change.
Templates are the ugliest part of Django. They are completely unaware of the target syntax, so very often the template itself cannot be validated as HTML, which makes it difficult to lint or reformat.
The only tool I'm aware of that can (mostly) correctly reformat Django templates is the PyCharm/IntelliJ family of IDEs, but their reformatting often introduces subtle breakage (such as adding new lines inside tag attributes) and requires careful review.
Thanks, and nice job on the build :) I came across 11ty today. Looked interesting. But, the moment I see code blocks my brain shuts down. I try to stick it out, but it's difficult. Trying tho!
Wow, just realized it passed its 21st anniversary last month. A few iterations throughout the years, but the current form is basically 13-ish years old, regularly updated.