Thinking right now: people love to consume content the closest to their platform of choice. People on Substack wants to consume content over there, people on Medium, the same, on Medium. That’s why the idea of manually cross-posting my newsletter to Substack often comes back haunting me. This newsletter is currently only available from Ghost (and RSS + email, of course).
I had plenty of time this weekend, but I must admit that I didn’t accomplish much of what I intended to work on. Sigh. 😒
From time to time, while scrolling through my Micro.blog timeline, I’ll pause, read a particular post, peak at someone’s profile and previous posts, remember that this guy exists and wonder why in the first place I was following him or her. Then I sometimes hit the unfollow. Why do I think this is some sort of failure ?
Doing some clean up in my RSS feeds where many feeds stopped working in the last 2–3 years. Of all of those who stopped blogging, I wonder why and what are they doing now.
I maintain a daily journal at work where I jot down the day’s highlights. I write about what went well, the current challenges I’m facing, and any opportunities to do something different. I also note the clients I spoke to and the reasons behind it. I’ve been doing this for a while now, but I never refer to the journal once it’s written. It’s just a dump of my thoughts.
I wonder why I’m doing this. I think the act of writing it down is the ultimate goal, not the end results. It’s the same with my personal journal. I rarely write in it, but I do occasionally. I rarely, if ever, refer to it. Why is that?
Now, let’s talk about blogging. Why is all that? Is there a pattern here?
After skipping a week, here is the latest edition of the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter. This edition is the one shared from Craft as a published document. The Ghost web-hosted version is coming later today.
I’m not too fond of text quotes shared as beautiful pictures (coming from Readwise, for example), especially if they don’t come with ALT text description. They look pretty, though. Here’s an example. I don’t like them because they hinder content indexing in some ways.
In my latest edition of The Ephemeral Scrapbook: “Got a keyboard. I took a break because of work. I’m skipping DeepSeek. The iPhone 16 Pro Max vs Samsung Galaxy 25 Ultra. Who wins? Marking the start of a dark era.”
Today, I decided to let go a few writing ideas from my “idea pipeline.” I realized that sometimes, the words we choose not to write are just as significant as the ones we do.
No one will ever control our own identities on third-party platforms. You relinquish control over your identity when you choose to present yourself on one of these platforms. You can be rate-limited for posting too much. You can be suspended by a bot that determines your behavior is bot-like. The platform can pivot at any time from one thing to another. The entire platform could shut down. You have no control, and jumping from one to another will only mean that you have to do it all again later.
Or, instead of all this, you could learn how to make a damn website.
But, asking for my wife here1, once you’ve got your little HTML island right in the middle of the digital ocean, how do you get noticed? How do you build a business, even the smallest one, from this island?
For real, i had a serious debate about all this today with her. ↩︎