Comment by throw0101d
7 hours ago
> Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers.
I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com. Substack allows for exporting posts (which would be good to do regularly just for backups in case of (account) compromise):
* https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037466012-...
so if you ever feel like the company is acting questionably, you can take that file and bring it in elsewhere, e.g.
> I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com.
I thought about this question when I recently started writing a few articles on Substack.
I chose not to use my own domain, even though I have a few.
Why? I want my writing to outlive me.
When I am no longer able to pay for domain renewals, my own domains will expire. Hopefully {my-hn-username}.substack.com will still be around.
Time will tell.
> Why? I want my writing to outlive me.
Donate to archive.org.
Excellent point! In fact I do have an automatic monthly donation to The Internet Archive.
Of course the URLs all change in archived pages, but at least the content is there for anyone motivated enough to find it.
A funny coincidence... I registered geary.com (my last name) in 1994, and just used it for email. A few years later I got a letter from a group of civic boosters in Geary, Oklahoma. They even enclosed a Geary Water Tower T-shirt which I still have. They saw that I didn't have a website up on this domain and asked me if they could have it.
I explained that this would be impractical since it was also my email address.
So they registered gearyok.com instead and put up a website built around Java applets. Oops.
But it got me thinking. I put up a static page (frequently edited by me) that I called Geary Central: A Guide to Gearys on the Net. This page is still up:
https://www.geary.com/oldsite.html
Naturally I gave Geary, Oklahoma top billing for inspiring this.
A few years after that I changed geary.com to a MoinMoin wiki devoted to the same topic, and moved the old static page to its current location.
Just a few days ago, someone emailed me about how they had stumbled onto my oldsite.html page and enjoyed this "blast from the past".
In 2011, my old ISP decommissioned the server I had the wiki on. I was planning to migrate it to something more modern like Drupal, but the time and effort weren't worth it to me at the time.
I did find the latest version of the "new" Geary Central on archive.org and shared it in my reply:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110927053309/http://www.geary....