I started writing this email to John Naughton re his recent Memex daily posts, but I thought both of us being public writers, I should just post it here and send a pointer. So here goes. #
John, I've been following the story of the strange URLs from your Substack newsletter. I also appreciated your telling how you produce your newsletter by copy/pasting from WordPress into Substack. I bet 90 percent of Substack's text comes in this way. And that's what this letter is about. #
I've been asking them to automate that part for you via an API or RSS, or whatever they specify, to remove the copy/paste step from your publication workflow. I am deliberately being a squeaky wheel, hoping that writers who use Substack will join in.#
Basically, it should be possible to hook your writing tool directly to both WordPress and Substack.#
I would have used Substack myself if it weren't for this limit. As a writer, I want to eliminate steps, to make my writing more effortless. Publishing an idea takes too many steps, as a result, a lot of ideas don't get out. #
I want to have a better flow on the web as a writer, and I think if other writers knew what was possible they'd want it too, and hopefully they would write about it. You wrote about it yesterday! ;-)#
JN, writers have a lot more power imho than they think. Esp in the early days of a service like Substack. They are listening to you. They know they depend on you. If enough writers wanted a feature, they would implement it. That's how development works. #
Please consider writing something yourself about eliminating copy/paste-to-publish step. There's a lot of power trapped in that limit. #
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)
