Merging is Good... The Thursday Newsletter - Issue #19

There can be only one

I’ve been maintaining two newsletters per week for this personal presence, plus three podcasts. Splitting the content between two newsletters (for the podcasts, the Substack newsletter served as a “show notes” announcement and placement, the end-of-week Revue edition as follow-up and/or pre-show for the following week) was perhaps confusing, but the experiment did yield results on the production side.

Simply put, Revue (this newsletter platform you’re reading from now) has an API, Substack does not. The Revue API is not great, and there aren’t so many wrappers around it to integrate with local projects, but it does exist, and that it is called “v2” gives some hope for a “v3.” Substack does not currently expose an API, nor does it plan to, according to their website.

As you can see, Revue still needs some work (call it meta, but pasting in a link to their own API reference doesn’t go so well within their newsletter context, but that is indeed a link to the API documentation). I was going to edit the Title and Description for this link item but for illustration, I did not.

The API itself needs work, I do hope there’s a version 3, but for a newsletter as a service platform, it will suffice for the near term. You can glance at the features of the API exposed thus far and perhaps you, too, will wonder about some of the choices, not to mention many of the missing bits of information about the features that are exposed, but it’s a start. No such luck with Substack.

I have been using Facebook much less than I was at, say, the end of May 2021. As of this issue, though, I am auto-publishing this newsletter to my Links page on Facebook. Will it be found? Who can say?

I also auto-publish a link to Twitter when this publishes. Twitter has become a dumping ground for a lot of stuff, so I’m considering both Facebook and Twitter to be the low-hanging fruit of inbound vector sites. I really would rather engage with people in better places, including in person! Email or other chats like Telegram, Signal, Element, and so on (look for more of this on my personal website) are good also… basically, I would like to chat in your place, or mine, and not hand everything over to Them.

Let’s own our presence in the world, including online.

In light of the various bits of news we are hit with almost daily lately, from various limitations and sanctions placed on content creators on the usual platforms like Facebook and Twitter and, especially regarding cash sanctions, YouTube, to outright chaos caused by abrupt policy change and change-back on the part of OnlyFans and others here and there, where adoption of a particular platform on which to place not only one’s content and fan engagement, but financial dependence, it is almost unfathomable that people still willingly hand over the keys to their kingdom to these platforms and their backing corporate interests. [Was that one long sentence? Yipes!]. As a programmer myself, the ability to compose my own workflows and create my own tools and whatnot is something that should be high on the list of mitigations, to avoid getting tied up and bogged down with weird policies and policy changes, shortcomings in the way of tools and APIs, and worse sometimes, changes to these without suitable warning.

There is an embarrassment of riches at our disposal nowadays, it is purely laziness, really, that prevents the nerdles from developing and deploying their own leading edge platforms, or at least tools and components to integrate with other existing components and tools, to own their presence online. This has been my recent goal, as it fits under the large golf umbrella of developing web-based applications anyway. Sure, Wordpress is a thing (which is definitely ready for the masses and remains in the majority of deployed content management tools, from what I understand), but choose any hero’s journey and along the way there is a milestone at which the hero builds their own solution, be it a canoe, a computer, or a lightsaber.

That Revue has some existing integrations and this rudimentary API means I can continue to explore this platform as a service and send it content from my own publishing platform(s), for projects like this personal “vanity” web presence, to a sign-up newsletter for new projects pre-launch, to a summary non-member newsletter, etc.

Revue doesn’t seem to expose the final construction calls, to update an issue image, adjust the send parameters, or to actually send the issue. There are several missing pieces, but at least there is a puzzle with open spots to fill, so it will be the near-term tool for some of the use cases I mentioned, maybe others, and fit into the overarching challenge of primary self-publishing and a migration away from third party platforms as primaries (that is, if I am posting original content to Revue or Twitter or, perish the thought, Facebook, I’m doing it wrong, and for the time being I am still doing it wrong…).

The Substack edition contains many links to YouTube stand-up comedy (bits or whole shows), that migrates here starting now. Over time the previous YouTube links will migrate into the blog so they can be published here via that API. To let’s start with one comedian:

Currently a well-known YouTuber wandering around Vegas trying food, drink, and fun and making videos about all of it, she got up on stage and did some bits!

Sometimes I would also include the current read, usually in audio book form from Audible or my local library, which I listen to while out walking in the neighborhood or at the gym.

The True Story of the Mason Murders. This was an included selection on Audible and since I do like to read about history and other non-fiction topics in general, I thought this might be interesting. In fact, it has been more than that, a fascinating telling (granted, from a particular point of view, but that is never not true) of what at the time must surely have been absolute insanity from the perspective of everyman watching this unfold in the news or closer to home. Really interesting.

Thanks for reading, subscribing, forwarding, etc. I use Buy Me a Coffee as an out-of-band link hub of sorts, which I’ll be updating with these newsletter changes and with new stuff rolling out, so that there’s always a central place to start from for updated links to existing and new endeavors.

As well, there does happen to be a way there to add to the caffeine supply. You are in no way obligated to do so, but there is a way if one so desires.

You will find there links to the Hugo Floss, Quoggling Sand, and FFS Talk podcasts, newsletters, and whatnot, and then the projects that I’ve been working on nowhere-near-enough for far too long. Solo is not only an awful movie, but a tough way to advance multiple causes simultaneously…

Photo by Alex Motoc on Unsplash