Substack

i was hanging out with my friend adam fangsrud last weekend and he mentioned my return to blogging and said that he was excited to have added me to his rss feed. i dawned on me that when i built foodbark.io i hadn’t even considered rss: it didn’t even have an rss.xlm page. so i spent some time this week reviewing the code and realizing that a lot of things were, and a lot still are, set up poorly. basically i got the site working well enough back in febuary and had switched from code to content and had never looked back. luckily adam’s rss reader is smart enough to have taken my index.xml page and rrs-i-fied it but i should count on that.

simultaneously i was browsing substack and ran into an article by new yorker contributor catherine shannon a brief defense of cliché. the article spoke me as it feels very much like the sort of pedantic in a cute way stuff i aspired to write in my 20s, but the fact that she was a professional writer making money and finding success, in part, through substack kind of blew my mind. so suddenly i had gone from not really thinking about an audience to figuring out how to syndicate my blog across platforms to rss and to substack.

in order to edit the code of the website and not break foodbark.io i had to first do some tweaking of the scripts i had written to migrate my writing and photos from obsidian where they are written in markdown over to the website which runs on hugo. i added a parameter -d for deploy so i could mess with things on a local server before deploying them to github and beyond to hostinger and foodbark.io and then beyond foodbark.io to substack and/or your rss feed. all of which wasn’t really all that complicated but was definitely kind of fun. thanks adam for the inspiration.