Content Finds a Way: Extinction and Reinvention

God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man creates website. Website destroys man.

Note: This is part two in the Content Finds a Way series.

Where we last left off, we’d survived the Triassic and Jurassic, including the rise of the dinosaurs, the initial splitting of the continents, and one or two site migrations.

Perhaps most harrowingly, we survived Blogger.

Science has truly given us so much.

Let’s continue our tour of our planet’s geologic history, then, including the lessons learned from oh-so-many prehistoric website migrations and domain name accumulations.

Hold on to Your Butts: a Geologic History of Accumulation, Evolution, and Extinction (cont’d)

As in our last post, we’ll break our timeline up into eras, epochs, etc.

The Cretaceous

Dinosaurs wave goodbye to each other as the continents further split. It’s like how people used to stand at the docks and wave to ships departing the harbor, except it takes millions of years and, as a result, the T-Rex’s tiny little arms get really tired.

I am tired of giving WordPress money, especially now that I have stopped publishing new Writescast Network episodes with their Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin. writescast.net and all of my sites for individual books and series are reconfigured to redirect to ryanrcampbell.com, which saves me a few United States Dollars every year.*

Why This Was Well-Intentioned

Check out the current price for a WordPress business plan and try to tell me I should have stayed with them.

Seriously, as of the date this post has gone live, a WordPress business plan is $25/month (that’s $300/year), and all it gets you (or all I really used it for) are some plugins and the ability to stand up an online store.

Those plugins and the online store are why I initially pursued the WordPress business plan; I needed a way to host and publish my podcast episodes to Apple Podcasts, and for a time I did sell signed copies of my books through my website.

But that $300/year covered only my author website.

When you account for the cost of that plan plus the premium plans I was using to stand up writescast.net and the sites specific to my books, I was dropping nearly $600/year on WordPress plans that didn’t even include a free annual domain name renewal.

So, yeah—in the same way the continents finally got serious about their split during the Cretaceous, I’m glad I, too, started to get serious about my split from WordPress.

The key word there being “started.”

Where I Beefed It

Did my moves during the Cretaceous save me some cash? Yes. Was I still leaving a bunch of money on the table each year? Yes.

How?

Because though I had consolidated writescast.net and my individual book and series sites, I was still forking over far too much (at least $300/year, remember) for the WordPress business plan that stood up my author website.

“Now, Ryan,” someone might have said if other humans had existed during the Cretaceous, “couldn’t you just downgrade your plan to either the premium or personal tier?”

And I could have, yes, if I wanted the Writescast Network to go dark and to have to redo my entire website.

The trick with the top-tier WordPress plan is that those plugins you pay for quickly balloon; no matter how much I might have diminished their value when I brought them up earlier, there’s a lot of power and functionality to be added to your site by taking advantage of them. Downgrading your plan shuts plugins down entirely.

That’d have meant no more Writescast Network on streaming platforms. No more online shop. No more Writing Prompt Generator or Google Analytics. You know, the good stuff!

None of this is to mention that in the absence of the Divi plugin by Elegant Themes, my author site would have looked like a pack of Anklyosaurus had taken their clubbed tails to it. A real smash-up job, and not in the good way.

Now, could I have pushed myself during the Cretaceous to do the work I would later do in the Paleocene and get off WordPress entirely? Yes, but if I was off doing that, who would have massaged the tired arms of those poor T-Rexes from all the waving they did as the continents split?

Lessons Learned

• Make incremental improvements where you can

• Keep an eye on accumulating costs over time

• Pride and elevated standards incur costs of their own

The Paleocene

An asteroid grants the arms of the T-Rex and all of its non-avian dinosaur friends a welcome reprieve. I welcome birds and other mammals to stay with me because I’m not up to much other than building a new ryanrcampbell.com from scratch after having reached my breaking point with giving WordPress any amount of money every year.

The birds refuse to shut up about how they’re technically dinosaurs. My fellow mammals are very grateful when I ask the birds to migrate on out of my house in a process that is nearly as painful as the one I endured to migrate all of my old blog posts from WordPress to my new website. All of this makes for a very sustainable situation with absolutely no identifiable drawbacks that will eventually require me to take further action. None at all.

What Made the Paleocene Worth It

Despite the sarcasm in the recap paragraph above, the moves I made during this epoch get a rating of mostly worth it.

Remember, there was huge financial upside in pushing myself to get away from WordPress altogether. On top of those savings, by creating my own site from scratch and hosting it with anyone other than one of the cookie-cutter website services, I could use the new site as a solid portfolio piece for my work as a software engineer.

The pains taken to facilitate this (described in the next section) also made for good engineering challenges to take on, even if I would have preferred to pursue them without a tight, gotta-get-it-down-before-my-plan-renews deadline looming over me.

Where This Came Up Short

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⚠️ Note: This section gets a little wonky, tech-wise.

If this makes you nervous, find the nearest consenting adult and ask them to hold your hand while you read.

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The downside of getting away from WordPress once and for all was the amount of time I had to spend building my new website from scratch and the extraordinary pains that were required to keep historic blog posts online given how WordPress makes your content available to you when you export it.

It’s almost like they don’t want you to leave.

As an example, here’s what the full slate of my historic blog posts looks like when I exported them using the WordPress mass export tool.

Yes, it’s largely just a lot of HTML strewn about in there at content.rendered, but, if you’ll recall, I’d started using the Divi UI engine at some point to further customize my site. This introduced additional layers of what I’ll call gobbledygook into my posts, and that gobbledygook, unlike HTML, does not go gently into that good night and become JSX without a hitch.

The journey to render a historic blog post in the new experience (tell me in the comments if you want a separate post that covers the code itself) wound up looking like this—

• A reader hits a URL on ryanrcampbell.com that matches the /:year/:month/:day/:slug/amp? format.

• If the year in the URL matched the years I wrote on WordPress or earlier, a nearly 70,000 line object was combed over to find a match for the remaining URL parameters of month, day, and slug.

• Once a match was found, the information the reader actually wanted (content.rendered) had (most of) the Divi gobbledygook stripped from it, was parsed as JSX, and rendered in the browser.

Even then, this wasn’t perfect. A number of media assets just… wouldn’t show up in the new experience. It was all very strange, and with hundreds of blog posts to account for, this quickly became a mess in its own right.

But at least I wasn’t paying (as much) for it! Monetarily, anyway.

Even if frustrating at times, however, the algorithmic gymnastics required above made this move something to feel good about from an engineer’s perspective—just not a blogger’s.

Lessons Learned

• Even the best intended moves come with trade-offs

• Outcomes are rarely clean

• Find value where you can, when you can

The Pleistocene

Glaciers creep across continents. That guy at work who wears shorts and sandals year-round finally relents and puts some socks on beneath those sandals. It’s a fashion faux pas, but even he has to draw the line somewhere.

Years of accumulated tech debt and creative bloat make it nearly impossible to write new blog posts without donning a hard hat and steel-toed boots. OSHA, if it had existed during the Pleistocene, would have been very pleased, but blogging like this would not prove tenable in the long run.

The Positives of the Pleistocene

You know what they say: nothing keeps you warm during an ice age like starting—or, in my case, restarting—a blog.

Yeah, I don’t know why they say that, either.

Aside from cold, I’d gotten itchy during this epoch; I often found myself wondering what now or what next?

It was at this time that I felt I’d finally adjusted sufficiently to a new career in a new city, and I’d at long last returned to reading in my free time. With all of these new thoughts in my head and experiences under my belt, getting back into blogging felt only natural.

And, having put in that work during the Paleocene to create my own website from scratch, I had a place to do it (mostly) rent free! I wrote a blog post every month or so for a while, but then… that momentum fell off.

Where The Momentum Went

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⚠️ Note: The tech wonkiness returns in this section. You’ve been warned.

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The eagle-eyed reader might have noted that my work in the previous epoch only supported historic blog posts. It didn’t address, in any capacity, how I might go about blogging in a sustainable way going forward.

Given the metaphorical Rube Goldberg machine I’d created to ensure historic blog posts were still available—and wanting to minimize my barrier to entry back into blogging—I leaned into a blogging “solution” that would let me use the infrastructure I already had in place without having to write entire posts in HTML at content.rendered.

If you’re curious to know how this all worked, well, it was a real cowboy job.

First, I created a new file, new-posts.js, that held all new post metadata. Then, in a neighboring set of directories, I would blog in JSX.

When a reader hit a URL ending in something like /2024/11/26/strategic-passion-a-playbook-for-aligning-passion-with-mastery, the year (2024), being greater than 2023, would have the site looking for a non-legacy post with a slug of strategic-passion-a-playbook-for-aligning-passion-with-mastery in a directory located at post-jsx/2024/11, as the URL indicated the post went live in November.

How much do you hate that? I can guarantee you don’t hate it as much as I did.

This was, again, a fine technical exercise, but it missed the point. Why would I lean into embracing a unique, yes, but more frustrating way of blogging when I simply… didn’t… have to?

Oh, and remember how I was trying to minimize my barrier to entry back into blogging?

Right. I’d missed the mark entirely.

Lessons Learned

• Future opportunities should be on equal footing with backwards compatibility

• Take advantage of existing infrastructure when you can (to a point)

The Holocene

The rest of humankind finally discovers the written word. Also, agriculture. Both are helpful because there’s finally an audience for my blog posts and, in a further boon, I no longer need to go berry picking each morning.

I finally accept that if I’m going to start blogging again, I need to make it as easy as possible to do so and subsequently migrate my blog posts to Substack.

I purchase roneverything.com and r-on-everything.com, the former because it is the name of this publication and the latter because roneverything.com looks a little too much like the homepage for someone named Ron Everything.

What (I Think) Makes This Work

Ah, the Holocene. The current epoch, at last!

I have to say, I’ve really enjoyed Substack so far; by cleaving the blogging functionality away from my bespoke site and moving it here, I’ve unlocked a number of (wince) synergies I wasn’t taking advantage of previously or that simply weren’t available back in the Pleistocene or earlier epochs—

• Low barrier to entry for blogging

• Full integration between historic mailing list and blog posts

• Opportunities for compensation

• Engaged, platform-agnostic readership

First off, as had been the case since the last ice age, I wanted to get back into blogging, and here I am. Mission accomplished!

Or, well, hopefully. I don’t plan to unfurl a banner or anything. 😬

Even as the work continues, there’s a lot of potential to tap into on Substack. That it provides writers with a single-solution platform to reach their mailing lists and interact with their readers while finding new ones, well, that’s the stuff of dreams.

Where This Might Come Up Short

It’s still early days and I’m encouraged by how matters have played out so far, but I’m keeping a diligent watch out for a couple of potential problem areas that might arise as a result of my migration to Substack.

I do find it a bit odd that new blog posts will be decoupled from what has traditionally been my author website. As I go, though, I may make updates to ryanrcampbell.com that provide links to my latest posts while making it clear that visitors will be redirected to R: On Everything to read them.

Another concern is far more fundamental, namely that I’ll fail to embrace the “on everything” declaration I’ve made in this publication’s very name. I suspect it will be all too easy for me to return to blogging about topics that other authors find interesting, but, as I wrote about in my series on mission statements, it’s important I hold myself accountable to embracing the curiosity-centric mission of R: On Everything.

My aim is to use that curiosity to cultivate an audience that gathers here not for writing and publishing tips—not that there’s anything wrong with that—but instead finds itself intrigued by the topics and themes that will wind up in my works of fiction as they are published and, in some cases, re-published.

There’s some worry, too, that my return to online engagement will lead to social media burnout. I love writing and engaging with readers, but there’s a temptation to fall into a scroll hole whenever one adds a new social media platform to their digital diet, and even Substack’s algorithms appear to incentivize polemic content that isn’t great for trying to go about one’s day without their jaw clenched.

Into the Future

Only time—and, God forbid (or God willing?), another mass extinction event—will make it clear whether my latest migration to Substack is the one, to the extent a one can exist at all.

And with the bullet-point lessons dropped along the way here and in the previous post, there’s surely so much more to explore in this space. For example:

• What lessons might we distill from the experiences I’ve outlined over the two posts in this series so far?

• How might those lessons inform not only how we got about establishing and maintaining an online presence, but other matters in our personal and professional lives as well?

We’ll answer those questions in the third and final installment of this series, but to do that, I need your help.

Tell me in the comments: what lessons have you learned in platform juggling over the years? Or, if you’re relatively new to the notion of platform, how have you gone about making your decisions so far? Are you feeling positive, overall, with where that’s led you?

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*These savings would have been valuable if the concept of paper currency had existed. Or the United States.