Housekeeping Update

What I did on my holidays ...

I know, I said I would be back from my unusu­ally long sum­mer break on the 12^th of January.

I also said I would be spend­ing some of that time work­ing out how to get this news­let­ter off Substack and on to some­thing more respectable.

Well, after spend­ing the last few days try­ing and fail­ing with vari­ous options that either don’t work or don’t meet my needs — and now crash­ing into the time I’m sup­posed to be doing paid work — I have to admit tem­por­ary defeat.

For a lot of people, Substack’s lais­sez fair atti­tude to far-right and Nazi con­tent is a deal break­er. Several poten­tial read­ers have told me that Substack isn’t a plat­form that they are pre­pared to engage with and I respect that.

For me, there’s also the nag­ging feel­ing that I’m mak­ing all this work to live on a plat­form that I don’t con­trol and that I don’t own. Whereas, I have my old web­site — star­ted in 2006 my love­lies — sit­ting on a serv­er in this house wait­ing for some atten­tion. No one can take it away from me, no one can sell it out from under me, and no one can under­mine the val­ues that sit behind all that work.

I want to own and con­trol the res­ults of my labours, not be in the fickle hands of olig­archs and white supremacists.

So, I thought, I should find a way to replace the func­tion­al­ity of Substack on WordPress. How hard can it be? The biggest con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem driv­ing more web­sites than any oth­er soft­ware in the world. A massive eco­sys­tem of developers mak­ing exten­sions and plu­gins to add func­tion­al­ity and make things look cool. And I make my liv­ing at the moment admin­is­trat­ing WordPress sites. No worries.

Turns out that there are ways to recre­ate bits of the Substack way of doing things but noth­ing that works togeth­er so seam­lessly and, if it gets close, it has a cost. Sending email costs money, who knew!

One day I’ll write about the last few days of ridicu­lous frus­tra­tion — for the bene­fit of any­one else think­ing about try­ing to do the same thing — but I’d prefer to solve the prob­lem myself and emerge tri­umphant! If any­one knows an ambi­tious web developer out there, there’s a quid or two to be made pro­du­cing a Substack clone for WordPress because there isn’t one at the moment.

Suffice to say that today’s exper­i­ments crashed the web­site twice, failed to send emails to all of my own addresses — get­ting through cor­por­ate fil­ters is a lot of what you are pay­ing for with Substack — or turned out after sev­er­al hours of work not to allow any branded edit­ing of the email template.

The closest I have come is a plu­gin that bridges the WordPress edit­or — good, it’s easy to write in, almost as easy as Substack — with com­mer­cial email senders like Mailchimp or Constant Contact but that costs five hun­dred bucks. A year! Plus the email costs which end up being roughly thirty NZ dol­lars a month.

I had wanted to remove the pay­wall and make all the con­tent — and the archives — free but that’s a bit too much for me to sub­sid­ise right now.

The les­son is that Substack has built a great product and the secret sauce isn’t the lovely edit­or I’m typ­ing in at the moment, it’s that emails arrive when you expect them to, look­ing like you want them to and it’s easy for read­ers to read what you write. And at my scale, it’s the cheapest option around.

I still want to move, get more con­trol and feel like I own my words — my archive — again but there’s no sat­is­fact­ory turn­key solu­tion right now.

Normal ser­vice will be resumed as soon as I can get my mojo back …

Other news

Talking about my old web­site, there have been a couple of changes there that you might want to look into.

The great New York crit­ic Glenn Kenny has moved his blog to Substack because his old plat­form — Typepad1 — closed down at the end of the year. I’ve tem­por­ar­ily made a home for his archive — over 2000 posts from 2006 to 2025 — at Funerals & Snakes until he can find a bet­ter long term solution.

Glenn was deputy edit­or at Première magazine for a good while and has writ­ten superb books about Robert De Niro, Scorsese’s Goodfellas and De Palma’s Scarface.

If you go search­ing F&S for any­thing of mine, you’re just as likely now to stumble across some gems from him.