Category: WebsitesCategory: Websites

1. Make your own Twitter

I mentioned recently that you should make your own Twitter, and it’s been fun seeing some subscribers run with the idea:

• https://pappasbland.com/feed
• https://timmcfarlane.com/work/the-almost-daily-art-life
• https://shinydesigns.com/category/studio-updates-feed/

We update our websites because platforms disappear.

For instance, Posts was a nice platform for designers and artists and programmers. I found it a few years ago, and discovered some cool art and a few apps.

It’s shutting down in May.

All the photos and designs will go away. All the stories about making vector animations or silk screen posters will no longer exist.

This is why we need our own feeds, on our own websites.

2. Join my About “About Pages” Workshop

Join me for a one-hour interactive workshop where we’ll focus on crafting or improving your About/Bio page. Whether it’s for your website or Substack, we’re work together to create something that aligns with your vibes.

➡️ Thursday, Feb 13 – 2-3:00 PM EST – Register and get the Zoom link here​

I’ll have have links to various About pages for inspiration, and we’ll talk about what every good About page should have, but I won’t be clicking through a deck and lecturing for an hour – heck no!

The even is free, but you can name your own price at check out if you’d like to support my work.

• Yes, this workshop will be recorded
• Yes, you should register even if you can’t attend so I can send you the replay video
• No, this won’t be a lecture
• Yes, this will be chatty and we will take time to work on our about pages in real time
• Yes, it’s free / pay what you want

➡️ Thursday, Feb 13 – 2-3:00 PM EST – Register and get the Zoom link here

3. Check your SEO Description

Google your publication or website and see what comes up.

This is updated on Substack here:

Skip the “hello, and welcome to my musings and whimsical thoughts that flutter through my noggin” intros and tell potential readers what they get before clicking.

Can you explain your work in one sentence? In five words?

4. Leave the house

From our pal Dedicate Your Life To Music (link):

Streams don’t make your career.

Followers don’t make your career.

People do.

If your career is stagnant, go to shows.

Get involved in your local scene.

Make friends and play house parties.

Meet people who love live music.

If your music is good, people will be so excited to share it with others. But they can’t do that if you’re fucking around at home worrying about your Spotify numbers.

This is universal wisdom, as it can be applied to other art forms, too.

Go to book readings, art galleries, photo exhibits, museums, craft fairs.

Be around the people you want to be around. Work hard at making good stuff, instead of obsessing over unsubscribes or clicks.

The experiences and lessons you learn make you who you are. We’re not talking just “words on a screen” or “lyrics to a song,” because this is 2025 and bullshit AI bots can do those things. Not well, but they can.

So that’s why we need to get out into the ugly real world, have some awkward conversations, show up someplace and not know anyone. Skip the algorithmic shortcuts that everyone else tries to game and cut in line by knowing people. Making connections. Networking but not in a gross way, but in a “omg my life is filled with amazing people” way.

AI bots can’t show up in venues on a Tuesday, or your D&D night.

Hop on a Zoom call with some fellow freaks. Or stay home and invite people over. Start a knitting club, a book club, a vinyl record club, a “show us the photos you made this week” club.

Thank you to Jelly for sponsoring today’s newsletter.

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Recently I said to make your own Twitter.

You can have a section on your own website, with your own domain name, where you can post your thoughts, and dreams, and links to cool things, and embed fun videos.

Don’t make your fans visit toxic platforms to find your regular updates, but instead invite them to your website.

An updated “news feed” gives fans a reason to visit your site.

Making your own “Twitter” means you start owning your deep thoughts and random ideas, rather than leasing them to other platforms (yes, even Substack Notes) for them to monetize and build upon.

If you’re using WordPress, you can add a basic feed to your site pretty easily.

1. Start adding posts under the Aside post-type, which WordPress describes as “typically styled without a title. Similar to a Facebook note update.”
2. Add a new Category where your “feed” will go under. I called mine Daily Feed, with a category description of “Like a social media feed, but on my own site.”
3. After you’ve got a few posts, add the “Ultimate Category Excluder” plugin. Once installed, select your new feed category so it’s not in your main feed. You can also exclude it from your RSS feed.
4. Add a link to your feed category in your main menu bar, so people can find it.

Our pal Casey says you can do this another way, too:

You can use the Posts or Post Grid/Carousel block and set it to only include posts from a specific category.

If you’re trying to do this on SquareSpace, I found this on their forum:

“What you want, images, videos, and next/previous pages are standard features with Squarespace blog pages. If you desire a newsfeed to be separate from other types of blog posts, use a page of summary blocks or a second blog page (the summary blocks are more versatile than the normal blog post listing page).”

And check out the good feed example from PappasBland photography using Cargo.

Again, we do this to have control of our writing, our photos, our music.

Sure, our work exists on Spotify and Youtube and Instagram and Substack and everywhere else you choose.

But now, for example, when I make a post on Substack Notes, I will be adding that note to my own site, as well.

Our sites then becomes a place for existing fans to appreciate our day to day work without being surrounded by the noise of social media feeds, without the need to be active on several other platforms.

And when new people discover our site, they can learn about our work without being sent to another platform, one which they might not even have account for (like TikTok, which U.S. new users can no longer download).

With a news feed on your website, you control the branding, the tone, the vibes. The potential reach is much lower, of course, but you’re building a body of work with potential to be discovered by anyone on the open web.

1. Start adding posts under the Aside post-type, which WordPress describes as “Typically styled without a title. Similar to a Facebook note update.”
2. Add a new Category where your “feed” will go under. I called mine Daily Feed, with a category description of “Like a social media feed, but on my own site.”
3. After you’ve got a few posts, add the “Ultimate Category Excluder” plugin. Once installed, select your new feed category so it’s not in your main feed.
4. Add a link to your feed category in your main menu bar, so people can find it.

I’m getting in the habit now of making sure anything I post on Substack Notes also gets posted to this Daily Feed category, which you can see in action here.

I read Hacker News because I have a geeky computer background (anyone remember the HotDog HTML editor?), though honestly these days I don’t understand 80% of anything on there.

That said, when I saw ‘The Debian Publicity Team will no longer post on X/Twitter’ I knew I had to check it out.

Turns out they made their own Twitter-like feed on their own website, where they can post all their bits and bops (they called it “micronews”).

You can should have a section on your own website, with your own domain name, where you can post your thoughts, and dreams, and links to cool things, and embed fun videos.

Don’t make your fans visit toxic platforms to find your regular updates, but instead invite them to your website, and keep them there. Give them something to dig into on your domain name, rather than shuffling them off for other companies to monetize your work.

Here are some examples of people who’ve added their own Twitter-like feeds to their sites:

• Sketch Book Niabi (and here’s a post talking about it)
• Pappas Bland’s Feed
• The Ripple Maker Daily Feed

If you’ve made a “feed” on your site, please let me know and I’ll add it here!

 

 

Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Jelly.

Stop sharing one email login for your entire team and start using Jelly, the simple shared inbox solution built for small teams. No overkill, no per-user pricing—just teamwork made easy. Plans start at $29/month for your whole team. Use code ESCAPECLUB15 for 15% off Jelly your first year.

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I haven’t posted to Substack Notes in a week.

Instead of a quick post, I’d write it out and put it on my blog, or send the link to a friend.

Rather than post a nice photo, I’d text it to someone I haven’t talked to in awhile.

Instead of posting, I’ll spend time writing emails, or getting taxes in order.

Instead of posting, I make some more coffee and read my Star Wars trilogy book.

Like Noah Kalina said in a recent Hotline Show video:

I was out taking pictures and I made a picture that I really like. I was working on it and I was like, “This is so good.” And I was like, “What am I going to do with this?”

My natural inclination is to want to post it on the internet, but why? I almost feel like it’s embarrassing to post things on the internet now.

Think of all those heart-felt posts to David Lynch we saw on Substack since he passed away. What happens to all of them 10 years from now if Substack doesn’t exist? What happens to them 10 days from now?

Imagine if they lived on your website, or in a zine you made with friends. A compilation cassette, with photocopied J-cards and limited to just 50 copies.

A silk-screened poster. A hand drawn bumper sticker. A phone call with an old friend talking about Twin Peaks, or starting a David Lynch night at your library.

We need to stop living a post-first existence.

We’re writing our messages on the beach, knowing the ocean will come in and wash it away. We post to keep the algorithms from getting mad, to remind our audience that we have things to say multiple times per day, throughout the week, month after month.

Our main artistic output should be enough, but instead we build an entire ecosystem of add-ons with automated email reminders from assorted platforms.

It’s not enough for our work to be inspired by our heroes. We nepost to remind the algorithms of relevant keywords to make it easier for the programs to pick who sees our 35 word tribute.

An hour long video interview isn’t enough. It must be broken up into bite-sized clips. Convert those clips to audio for podcast or audio embeds. Then we post all this work on the beach while the ocean has pulled back for a moment, hoping that our fans walk by at the right moment and see all our hard work.

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We might have 100 subscribers that we email once a week.

Yet we’ll post throughout the week to hopefully reach 5% of our “followers,” a concept we scoffed at here on Substack, yet we keep playing the game.

But I’m hearing more people believe those 100 subscribers are enough. Make the work, hit publish, then go about our day.

Maybe sharing with 100 people could be enough.

Like I said in ‘The best work is boring work’ a week ago:

Maybe it’s not even called “marketing,” but it’s a return to the truest form of your work and practice that makes it easier for the work to speak for itself, which in turn frees you to get closer to the heart of who you are, which is probably the best marketing work any of us can hope for.

What if our practice became so deep and rich that the 100 people lucky enough to be on our email list started telling more people?

What if the magic isn’t about hitting an arbitrary subscriber count, but reaching the tipping point in our work where the magic can longer be contained, and it begins to spread without us needing to write messages on beaches?

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