The one where I created a horcrux

My blog has existed at Substack for quite some time now - often as a side project of sorts - a foothold - while the “real” blog existed elsewhere.

At some point - perhaps a couple of years ago now - while other platforms such as Wordpress and Tumblr eroded away, Substack became a last stand of sorts - a last place my words could be found.

And I’ve become increasingly unhappy about that.

Don’t get me wrong. Substack is wonderful. Of all of the hosted publishing platforms that have existed in recent years, it’s clearly the most popular - with a daily influx of famous faces appearing in the roll-call of newcomers.

I guess my problem is really the platform’s problem - and what happens when you get enough people in one place, and you involve money (Substack supports paywalls, if you were wondering where this is going).

In the space of a year, Substack seems to have become Medium. And that’s never a good thing to happen. Back during the pandemic, Ev and the gang at Medium built a wonderful machine that allowed people to write, and readers to award you a proportion of their subscription fee in the shape of feedback. A like at Medium was worth actual money.

It didn’t take long - once Medium gained serious traction - for the same marketing morons to appear that ruin everywhere else on the internet for everybody. Suddenly every article was about how to gain followers, subscribers, likes, money, fame, fortune, and everything in-between. In short order the remaining pool of paying readers found themselves in an enormous game of “shooting fish in a barrel”.

The same thing is happening to Substack. The “notes” wall is filled with strategies, offers, and insights into how to make money on the platform. Snake oil sales-people purport to understand “the algorithm”, and lead people like pied pipers to their promised lands - guides to get rich quick - behind a paywall.

Money ruins everything.

Back when I started writing a blog - back before any of the hosted solutions existed - self hosting was the only option. You had to acquire webspace, install software on it, configure the software, perhaps hook up a domain name, and then - only then - could you begin posting anything to pollute the web.

Over time a plethora of platforms appeared - among them LiveJournal, Blogger, TypePad, Wordpress, Vox, Yahoo 360, Posterous, Drupal, Joomla, and Squarespace.

My blog existed on most of them at one time or another.

The key thing about all of the early platforms is they didn’t try to connect people. You had to build your own connections - by adding guestbooks, blogrolls, and RSS feeds.

RSS was explicitly invented such that readers could read regardless of platform or technology. RSS Reader services became enormously popular - with the likes of Google Reader, Bloglines, Feed Demon, and Radio Userland becoming the homepage for many people’s browsing experiences.

Circles of friends grew up across wildly different platforms - running entirely different software, but ultimately compatible with one another.

And then it all changed, with the arrival of the walled gardens.

MySpace probably started it. Or LiveJournal.

Suddenly you had to have an account on the same platform in order to like, or comment on a post. The walled gardens had arrived, and they ruined everything.

So... why am I going on about all of this in the dead of night?

Because I’m going to try something out. Granted, it’s a bit of a Don Quixote move - tilting at all sorts of windmills - but when has that ever stopped me in the past?

This afternoon I created an account at Blogger - one of the last of the “old school” blog hosts, then opened Visual Studio Code, and instructed Claude to figure out what the Blogger import format looks like. Once it figured that out, I gave it access to the motherlode of my past blog posts - stretching all the way back to 2003 - and asked it to create yearly import files for Blogger.

The first few imports worked.

Minutes later it occurred to me that Claude could be of further assistance. I instructed it to look at the stock theme that ships with the Ghost blogging platform - a wonderful theme called “Caspar”. I asked it to figure out how to re-write Caspar as a Blogger theme file.

An hour later I had a presentable replica of my Substack blog in existence on the internet.

This evening it occurred to me that it might be nice to attach the new blog to a domain name - so set about releasing “recursivewords dot com” from the clawed hands of Wordpress, and delivered it to CloudFlare - who were then instructed how to wire the domain up to Blogger.

And that’s how a wonderfully minimalist incarnation of my blog came into existence this afternoon and evening. You can visit it right now - at https://www.recursivewords.com.

I’m considering making the theme available as open source - because I can see more people retreating to Blogger if platforms such as Substack continue to be deluged with get rich quick idiocy.

Anyway. It’s getting late. Half past my bedtime, as my middle daughter would once have said.

We’ll see how this digital horcrux idea goes. If it has legs or not. If nothing else, it’s been fun to tinker with Blogger, and remember how the internet once was.