Two Years on Substack
I've been here for two years but it's a journey I started a long time ago!
I built my first website in the late 90s. It was a simple affair, just a couple of pages, an overview of my art and music. I had taught myself how to code using online resources, Arachnophilia (an excellent free web editor) and my Virgin.net account!
Such was the fledgling state of the internet at that time, that an art degree and my simple website were enough to land me a decent web designer job in 2000!
So I was in, a designer at one of the most interesting points in the history of the internet → Web 2.0! And for a few years it was great fun being part of that. Google was a disruptor and web design was cool → k10K!
And the Blogosphere happened! I loved the Blogosphere — designers and developers, personal blogs all loosely linked together through “blogrolls” and RSS feed readers — web standards, browser wars, Jeffrey Zeldman!
I always wanted to be part of that and started a blog many times but I could never manage to keep one going. To be honest, I don’t think I had enough interest to write about web design and coding. Then social media came along, the blogosphere subsided and for many years my web presence became a simple business website for my freelance web design services.
More recently I tried again to find an online home (now music focused). I started on Soundcloud and Instagram, but they were not built for words, for blogging. Twitter and Bluesky and Mastadon do not work well for me either, those kinds of text “snippet” sites are too quick, too harsh, and too overwhelming for my brain, and also no good for longer form content.
Of course, I could have built my own site at any time using WordPress or Squarespace, but an independent blog is a hard place to begin these days without the help of blogrolls and blogospheres! It’s hard to build a community from scratch on your own.
Tomorrow marks the second anniversary of my first post on Substack. I found Substack through the This Week in Sound and Quiet Details newsletters. It looked interesting and I thought it might be a good place for a studio journal.
This is post 73 of that studio journal which, for me, is quite an achievement! 🥳
There was something about this place that I liked straight away. The editor was well designed, you could upload audio, video, images and you had a fair amount of scope to personalise your substack layout and design. And the “vibe” was different, slower, more ponderous and personal than on other social media. Long-form!
Substack also has the network built in, the blogroll! Notes, likes, re-stacks, recommendations, they all make this a powerful place where it feels like blogging can work again.
It hasn’t been easy. I’ve had a lot of false starts and mis-steps and I’m still very much finding my way! Recently, I’ve been writing more and working through all the usual doubt and imposter syndrome that comes with that for me, but I’m making good progress.
Substack has also had a few ups and downs itself in that time. It’s really not wise to rely too much on a platform these days because you never know what is coming next, but at least Substack is a newsletter platform at its core and so I can always export my content and subscriber list if necessary.
Currently, I’m really enjoying writing WHIRRINGS here. I’ve managed to find some consistency and have a lot of ideas for building this out further into an interesting online home for my music, field recording and writing, and to also make it a place that is useful to others. I’ve even, somewhat tentatively, started working on a new paid subscriber offering!
So perhaps this is my first successful blog after 25 years of trying!
Thank you all for reading and hopefully we’ll still be here in another two years! 🙏
Also, today I am 56 — so a very happy old birthday to me! 🎂
Happy Birthday :)
Happy birthday, Mark!