substack on Brian McCrory

Jazz of Japan v4.0 (Substack + Markdown)

Wed, 03 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

May 2023: Moving to Substack + Markdown

Now that the entire system was stored in GitHub as articles, images, audio, layouts, and code, I returned to Substack to reintroduce the newsletter functionality and update the website’s look and feel.

While the GitHub/Jekyll-based version was functional and straightforward, there were some limitations that I was facing. Aside from social media promotion (that I had tried before, and decided to avoid), there was no convenient way to share articles more widely, such as with a newsletter.

Jazz of Japan v3.0 (GitHub)

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

January 2022: Moving from Substack to GitHub

Using Substack was great for writing and sending out free-form writing, but there was some extra functionality that I was looking for. Now that I had about 150 articles with many drafts in progress, I wanted to better organize things and have a standard structure that was easier to work with.

Since most of my posts were about albums, I was using a regular layout for each article, like a template with a specific format and well-defined sections.

J Jazz v2.0 (Substack)

Sun, 30 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

WordPress was becoming an unnecessary hassle, and I found an easier alternative by moving to Substack.

May 2021: Moving from WordPress to Substack

Substack offered an attractive solution: a simple design that featured newsletter functionality with a nice-looking web archive. The writing interface and dashboard was also refreshingly simple and clean. It was comparatively simple, a great interface to focus on writing and organizing posts.

In 2021, Substack was rapidly changing, enlisting high profile writers and sponsoring growth programs, yet the Substack team still seemed to have an independent startup freshness. Their support and outreach team was involved in weekly community discussions and enthusiastic to hear ideas from, and grow with, their writers. The platform was growing, but it was still all about writing newsletters.