I've been spending some time on Quake resources these past few weeks. Writing tools to parse Quake data files, writing a QuakeC VM, etc. What's great is that the resources from that era are old-school HTML pages. No Javascript, no cookie banner. Easy to save and parse. Easy to search into.
If you produce actual interesting content that are archival worthy (which I think Chip and Cheese does) you should really make sure your content delivery platform is as simple as possible. Take HN as an example.
What matters is the content of your article, not how they are presented. Most of the time, presentation these days gets in the way between you and the content. And substack clearly does.
I consider simple HTML pages as a quality signal. Whereas if the content is posted on a large platform, I'll consider it likely to be rubbish (if I can read the content at all without demands to install the app, sign up, or subscribe).
Plus, WordPress is open source (a philosophy the org supports), isn’t inherently insecure (the main thing that will make it insecure is a shady plugin, so don’t install random plugins that look weird), and really shouldn’t be that expensive to operate with a CDN in front of it. You can totally do newsletters with WordPress too. The only benefit Substack really has is that it gives you everything out of the box. Which is an amazing benefit. But you can accomplish every listed goal there with WordPress!
aside: am a WP core contributor, so I may be biased :p
I usually just hit the back button if I see the Substack layout, because I've wasted too much time reading a teaser and then hitting the obnoxious paywall at the bottom. (Paywalls on blogs! What has the world come to?)
Huge congratulations to the Chips and Cheese team on what they have achieved. The quality and volume of posts on the site - particularly from clamchowder - has been stunning.
IMHO sustainability of the site should be a primary concern. The team should really do what they think is best, given their time and resources, to enable them to continue to deliver on their mission.
> Decreased monthly cost compared to the current WordPress + Cloudflare setup
Curious what the setup currently is that it is considering monthly costs? It 'only' had 911 369 views in 2023, that is not particularly taxing for static content.
Congratulations on the success so far! Clamchowder's contributions shine light into micro-architectures in a way that is without parallel. I always look forward to new articles, especially on the CPU side.
Substack is not great. Please look for something else.
The two major aspects I'd like to see improved are:
- Consistent and easy way to access to full resolution images
- Reader-mode support, right now it's hit or miss with many pictures just not rendering
