The Chronicles of Substack, Episode 1
Rick Retro’s Realm, Behind the Scenes #22: The Chronicles of Substack, Episode 1 – “The Good, the Bad, and the ‘I Can Live With This’”.
I don’t want The Chronicles of Substack to be a long-running series. Once we’ve retired the text group and everything happens beyond the lamppost, the Pevensies won’t be going back. The point of view becomes in Substack, not about Substack.
But for now, let’s give a title to Episode 1 of The Chronicles of Substack: “The Good, the Bad, and the ‘I Can Live With This’”.
The Good
1) I’ve got this! Substack has some quirks, but overall I’m very pleased with it. I can pretty much bend it to my will and create the website that I want and that you will love. They may call my work a “publication”, but I can give you more than that.
2) Post improvements. Compared to the text group, there will be two significant enhancements to posts. First, the ability to include images allows me to bestow better-looking posts upon you. Second, and far more important, links in posts change them into the equivalent of wiki pages, giving you enhanced ability to explore and discover the treasures of fun and info I will be shoveling into the site each week.
3) Sections. They’re a plus. Tabs across the top let you go to a section, let’s say Reviews. From there you can look at just the Reviews, with convenient Previous and Next buttons to navigate through them.
4) Subscribers. Our text group of family and friends who mostly know each other has been fun. But I’m looking forward to meeting new friends and I hope you will find an interesting new community with us. S became my first subscriber from this group. Thanks, S! I hope the rest of you visit and sign up soon.
The Bad
Not too much. Just that it’s time-consuming. So far I’ve uploaded around 27 posts from our text group, everything except Reviews and Rankings from December to the first few days of January. It takes about 5 minutes to get one of the simple posts just right. It will likely take longer for more complicated ones.
I’m hoping to have most of the text group posts up by the end of this week. I haven’t decided about the old reviews: I could post them now in the original form, or wait until I’ve re-reviewed them in the new format. That has already begun with the Dickens’ novella. One down, 42 to go.
The “I Can Live With This”
So yeah it's cool that within a section there are Previous and Next buttons at the bottom of each post. But what if you want to go through all the posts, across all sections?
Nope, even when reading the posts from the Archive, where they all exist from newest to oldest, the Previous and Next buttons at the bottom of the post respect Section boundaries. You, my dear reader, need my help. I can add those section-ignoring buttons to each post. I’m happy to do this and haven’t cursed Substack out loud even once for not allowing me to enable this to happen automatically. 🙄
Stay tuned for Episode 2, coming soon!
Thanks for your support.
Keep the comments coming!
Go to rickretro.com and subscribe!
Originally posted to text group 2025-02-02
Last updated 2025-02-10