Housekeeping Update

What I did on my holidays ...

I know, I said I would be back from my unusually long summer break on the 12th 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 …

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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 Premiere 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.

1. This is the kind of shit that I’m worried about here at Substack. They’ll close down or be sold to Elon Musk or something and then I’ll lose everything.