Tag: blogger

Move to Substack?

Ever since I acquired this domain name (back in 2008), this blog has been hosted on WordPress. However, now I’m starting to wonder if I should port it to Substack (the URL will remain the same). Let me explain why.

Recently, the admins at Substack wrote an article that “blogging boom is back“. Quoting,

What we’re seeing now feels a lot like that early blogging boom. There was an intimacy we felt reading our favorite blogs, a personal connection to the writers and the communities that grew around them. We stacked our Google Reader with their RSS feeds and turned to them for restaurant recommendations, recipes, home decor trends, crafting inspiration, gossip, political analysis, and life advice. Writers on Substack are providing that same intimacy and connection with the communities they create. No media conglomerates edit their words and ideas. We have access to our favorite writers, just as we did in those fast blogging days. We see ourselves in the personal stories they share; we trust them.

Having started (and not really continued) some five or six substacks in the last five years, I broadly agree to this sentiment. And the reason why I feel like Substack might be “the old blogging in a new form” is due to comments. People actually comment on Substack, unlike on WordPress.

I was reading a friend’s substack yesterday, and noticed a possibly Freudian slip. I quickly hit the comment button and shot off a comment. As of this morning, he has already seen it and replied. This was a regular feature on the blogosphere in the late 2000s. In the 2010s, this kind of behaviour simply died.

And coming to think of it, it possibly has to do with user experience. The user experience for commenting on WordPress absolutely sucks. There is no concept of login across sites (I don’t know when this “openID” was last maintained). So every time you need to write a comment, you need to enter your name, email, website, and maybe even fill a captcha before your comment gets accepted. And that is IF your comment gets accepted (the number of times I’ve written an elaborate comment and seen it NOT go through is insane).

Two decades ago, when blogging was big and growing rapidly, people used to leave comments on one another’s blogs. A LOT. In fact, I discovered a lot of blogs I followed back in the day by following comment trails from blogs that I already liked. It could occasionally be riotous, like on this legendary post by Ravikiran Rao.

And then sometime in 2010 or 11, it all stopped. Almost all of a sudden. I have statistics on number of comments per post on this blog over the years, but right now NED to pull it up (and also, the commenting was heavier when this site was on LJ). Suddenly people stopped commenting. And I think this had an impact on blogging as well. With little or no feedback, people didn’t feel like writing.

People started talking about the death of blogs. Sometimes, writing this would feel like shouting into an empty room. Then again, I’ve considered this as a documentation of my life and my thoughts (and your benefits, if any, being strictly collateral), and carried on.

What Substack seems to have shown is that the appetite for blogging didn’t go away. The appetite for commenting also didn’t go away. It’s only the user experience. Over the years, maybe coinciding with WordPress being the dominant blogging platform (and WordPress being more popular for making websites than for blogs), the user experience of commenting deteriorated. And as people commented less, they blogged less.

Now, looking at the comment density on Substack, I’m seriously considering if I should make a shift there. Still need to see how easily I can port all of this stuff without breaking. But if I can, I might just. What do you think? Do leave a comment (and if you think this blogpost is too hard to comment on, maybe comment on this “note” instead).

Joint Blogging

So the more perceptive of you would have noticed a major change in this blog overthe last couple of weeks. It has now become a multi-author blog with my wife Pinky joining me here.

The chief motivation for this is feedback I received over the last one year that my blog had become boring and one-dimensional. Considering that I’ve been going through some sort of a mental block over the last few months, and am unable to produce posts with the same quality and frequencyas i used to earlier, I decided that the best way to spice up this blog was to bring in a co-blogger.

Around the same time, I got married to Pinky, who is herself a blogger,  so it  was natural to bring her in. And in the last couple of weeks, since I added her as an author, she has responded spectacularly, producing posts (albeit of a different flavour compared to what I produce, of course) with significnatly better regularity and quality compared to me.

So I just want to make it clear that the decision to make this blog a joint one is a conscious and well-thought out one, and not one that has been made due to marital compulsions or anything. Yes, we have markedly different writing styles, so you need not even look up or down to check the author’s name at the bottom of the post or the top of the RSS feed.

This decision to make this blog a multi-author blog is irreversible (yeah, I won’t rule out future expansion, if we are to get suitable co-bloggers; but that won’t happen for a while). So those of you who are trying to debate about the quality changes in the blog because of this change (in the comments section) are just wasting your time. And if you think that the quality is dropping for whatever reason, there is the “unsubscribe” button that your RSS feed aggregator offers you.

I’m working on producing author-specific RSS feeds, so that might allow people to selectively subscribe to posts. Essentially we are looking for a way by which our posts will appear on our respective facebook pages, rather than on everything appearing in mine. If anyone knows how to do that for a wordpress.org blog, plis to be letting us know.

When I got Varmalanched

So one of India’s 50 most powerful people has released his book My Friend Sancho. People who have already read it tell me that it is a great book. I’ve read bits of the first chapter which he had put up online a few months back, and despite the fact that I dont’ normally read fiction, this had me fairly interested. However, my unread pile at home is still quite tall, so I don’t plan to buy this for a while at least. And the Delhi launch of the book is on a weekday, so I can’t attend that either.

So a while back I was going through Aadisht’s archives. I was looking for one specific post which he had written sometime in our 5th term at IIMB, and I managed to find all other posts he had written at that time, except the one I was looking for. And one of those posts had a linked to one of my posts, which was the only time when my blog got Varmalanched.

Instapundit is a famous blog aggregator and legend has it that whenever instapundit links to a blog, it goes down due to the sudden spike in trafffic. This is called an instalanche. Similarly when desipundit was good (in its early days), a link from there would lead to a small disaster (especially for people working with limited hosting space and bandwidth) which gave rise to desilanche. So when India’s most powerful blogger links you, you get Varmalanched.

The occasion was a post that I had written in search of lost love. I had seen a fairly cute girl at the Bangalore Landmark Quiz 2005, and had blogged asking for her whereabouts. First Aadisht linked me. Then I got desilanched (there were a few desipundit regulars who would read my blog back then). And then the ultimate thing happened. Varmalanche.It was like all the interwebs were trying to help me out in my search for love. If it had succeeded, it would’ve been truly filmi.

I was hosted on Liverjournal back then so my site didn’t actually go down. But this was the first time that a post that I had written had gotten more than 50 comments. I have linked to the livejournal post here (rather than the noenthuda.com page) so that you can read the comments. Do read the comments, they are extremely insightful and funny (ok now I seem to be pitching that blog post like Ravi Shastri pitches that 2020 magazine).

Commenting on that post, Gaurav Sabnis had advised me to shift to Pune saying that that was the only way I could improve my social skills. I interpreted his advice differently. A month later, I was hitting on a girl who was then living in Pune. That story had ended in disaster, though. A year back I met up with Salil the Younger for the first time and teamed up with him for a couple of quizzes. The first thing he mentioned to me was this particular post of mine and his comment on it. It is in the same thread as Gaurav’s comment.

Then there was Shamanth who was trying to convince all my readers that I would never get the girl because he had already bagged her (by giving her chocolate during the quiz). Do read his comments on the post, and the replies to them. Insightful again. And there was Gayathri, a girl who was then unknown to me who had taken to commenting on each of my blog posts. Her comments, and her conversations with Shamanth, are also insightful.

I have attended two landmark Bangalore quizzes after that. On each occasion, I’ve looked through the entire crowd trying to find this girl, without much success. On several occasions I’ve tried to describe this girl to fellow-quizzers and asked me to help me identify her. No luck there either. I’ve had a long history of stillborn relationships – things that were over before they could take off. I suppose I should accept the hard facts and add this one also to that already long list.