Vibe coding is fun and all (here’s my new Hunterthen site), but the behind the scenes work is not.
Updating DNS settings, SSL certificates, troubleshooting your router to not block FTP traffic? SHEESH.
Social media won because it was easy; upload a photo, write a quick bio, and you can upload a video all within 10 minutes.
But if we can’t set up a website in less that 15 minutes then it’s just not worth it.
It’s not that it’s hard, it just takes a bit to figure stuff out. We can do hard things!
I’ve been fiddling around with DNS stuff since the mid 2000s and I’m glad I have Claude to ask about my CNAME settings to properly authenticate my SSL cert.
Then again, this is why everyone doesn’t write a book either. It takes time and patience. Plenty of hurdles.
Either you want to do the thing, and will do whatever it takes, or you won’t.
On Break Up 💔 With Social Media Day on Valentines Day, I deleted the YouTube and Substack apps. I reinstalled the YouTube app one day, lost about 20 minutes to scrolling through Shorts, deleted it again, and have seriously kept the phone plugged in and out of sight most of the time since.
I work from home, don’t drive much, and I answer emails and Slack and Asana stuff when I’m at my computer. Sure, I use my laptop quite a bit, but cutting three hours of iPhone time from my life has felt great.
I spent so much time on the Substack app just “keeping up.” Joining in with conversations, replying, replying to replies, managing DMs, sharing articles I liked. Seriously added up to over an hour a day, easily.
Getting back 7+ hours per week means I can write more. Or repurpose a bunch of the video and audio I’m already making every week. Processing and reflecting on all the calls and interviews I do with people every day.
That’s the work I should be doing, instead of dealing with 100 little pebbles of “engagement” per day on the Substack app.
I still have not consumed content on the phone, three weeks in. That’s awesome, and I want that to stay that way.
That was the killer for me, too – video. Making coffee, put on a YouTube video. Scroll the YouTube shorts. Warming up coffee? Repeat. Eating lunch? Catch up the latest Colbert zingers.
A solid week without all that? Just under 20 minutes of screen time per day? Yeah, I wanna keep this going.
Love this from Rolling Stone: “Johnny Blue Skies, the guy formerly known as Sturgill Simpson, will release a new album only in physical format.”
No streaming, just vinyl, CD, and cassette.
As Steve Vai once said, “I get paid the most.” As more artists call the shots, and resist the allure of giving everything away for free, then we’ll see some actual change in the creative world.
Spotify won’t one day wake up and start paying more. Nor will the general public just stop streaming everything for $10 a month.
MIST: Like Google Docs, but for Markdown files, by Matt Webb.
I want to be able to share a Markdown doc as easily as sharing a link, and have real-time multiplayer editing, suggested edits, and comments, without a heavyweight app in the background.
Rekall is a “A cyber-retro-futurist aesthetic image blog,” and it’s updated every night since 2010 by Steve Gaynor.
We’ve all come across image feeds like this on social media platforms, but.. well, platforms come and go, but our websites endure so long as we keep paying for our domain name and hosting.
On the first of the month I’m reminded to download my photos from my iPhone. I do this so I don’t have to keep paying Apple a monthly fee that just keeps going up, and I just like having my photos right where I can see them, in folders.
For December I have 215 photos, 54 screen shots, and 18 videos. I’ll keep that saved locally on my MacBook Pro (just 3.5GB), and start a new folder for January where I’ll dump the photos from my Nikon throughout the month.
Then, in February, I’ll move this January folder to my external hard drive.
My folders goes all the way back to 2002, but it’s not nearly as organized. The total is about 57,000 photos, which takes up 207GB on my 2TB drive, backed up regularly to BackBlaze.
Yeah, I miss the search functionality (finding all the photos of bikes, or cats would be great), but I love only paying .99 cents per month for iCloud instead of $120 a year.
The holdiday downtime has given me some breathing room to get this project done, moving 500 or so posts from Substack to my WordPress blog at Social Media Escape Club.
I did this 100% manually, too. I think I tried exporting awhile back and it crapped out somewhere along the line, and I just said fuck it, I’ll do it one at a time, which really wasn’t so bad because some stuff I wanted to reformat, re-do, or remove 100% anyways.
Why move all my posts from Substack to WordPress? Because someday the Substack platform will cease to exist, and I’ll have no record of my work otherwise.
My first music blog from 2001 is gone because we were young and dumb and moved onto other things, and we didn’t pay the hosting bill, and oops the domain name lapsed.
The 2000+ metal trivia questions I posted on Twitter as @skulltoaster from 2011-2018 are all gone, along with the 1000+ email newsletters via Mailchimp.
If I get locked out of my account, or Substack goes away, five years of writing goes away with it, and I don’t want that to happen.
Each Substack post is getting moved, and in its place I write “this post has moved…” along with a link to its new home on WordPress. This removes any duplicate work which might affect my SEO or domain health… but that’s secondary to me owning my work, my writing, my ideas.
I will keep sending my newsletter via Substack (for now), but it will not be my base of operations. Everything gets written on my blog first, then it goes from there.
Each newsletter post will include just enough meat and bones to make it a worthy open and read, and they’ll be links throughout for anyone who wants to go deeper.
As I wrote earlier this year, “my newsletter isn’t my permanent address, it’s a delivery truck.”
The LG enV VX9900 was the most notable phone I owned before the iPhone in 2007 or 2008.
The Qwerty keyboard was great for texting, but my goodness, can you believe we used screens that small? The resolution was pretty good, but still, the screen was so small, yet the phone was so bulky.
Given the chance I definitely wouldn’t go back to using this phone.
