how to get ghosted, with technical benefits

With a new look and feel and years of posts back together under one roof, this update has been a long time coming...

You may have noticed that CSG looks a little different all of a sudden. The emails aren’t quite the same, and they have more links. The web experience doesn’t have that strict, uniform, forced minimalism anymore. Things look less like they were poured into a mold and rearranged with a hope for the best, and more like they're designed to look, feel, and work a certain way. On top of that, there's a whole lot of extra content that wasn't there before.

Well, there’s good reason for that. This newsletter is doing a Danny Phantom and going ghost. Or, to be more specific, moving to Ghost, the much needed spiritual and technical successor to WordPress, the most extensible and popular platform when I started blogging all the way back in 2008, but a perpetual laggard built on an ever more unstable Jenga tower of hacks today.

At the end of January, I sent out a little update about some housekeeping I’ve decided had to be done after accidentally setting up an interesting experiment that opened my eyes to a few things with hard data. In it, I said that merging all my posts I managed to spread across three sites will be a multi-step process that needs time to get done the right way. Well, time has passed, work has been underway, and as you can see, progress was made, and a big part of the progress was moving away from Substack.

I’m not trying to make a grand statement here because moral high ground around web platforms is tenuous at best, and my biggest problem with Substack is really that it’s one of the poster children for what’s wrong with social platforms today. It’s a place that expects you to become a one person content farm in virtually every possibe medium while sacrificing any personal flare or design to better fit into the infinite scroll of standardized little boxes with a subscribe button on top.

All of the problematic newsletters and behaviors are just a consequence of this noxious strategy and the terrible incentives it provides for both creators and users. Obviously, I’m not a fan because as someone who did professional web design, it’s just irritating to have so few options to customize or improve readers' experiences with a few small but meaningful touches, and provide them with a space that isn't yet another infinite scroll of 16:9, or 4:5, or 1:1 boxes.

Plus, selfishly, I want full control over my image library, custom code, embed and accent content so it actually looks good, and have a good chance to bring back the thousands and thousands of comments on this content, while also having a reliable newsletter engine under the hood. Unfortunately sacrifices had to be made and it's just not possible to bring over Substack comments, but the older comments synced with Disqus? Should work with a little elbow grease, although it's proving just a bit more complicated than advertised, as is usually the case.

This iteration is still a bit of a work in progress and will get minor updates over the next several months just to fix any visual bugs, improve styling, and complete the comment migration so you get a proper experience. But all the basic site usage and email updates should work just fine, or have only temporary glitches, the kind that can be fixed with one line of code and a quick reset as we settle into a new engine.