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My Substack newsletter is literally a copy and paste from my blog - I built a custom tool for it: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/4/substack-observable/

Everything substantial I write goes on my blog.

The one challenge I'm having at the moment is where to put short "thoughts" that aren't accompanied by a link. I used to use Twitter for those, but now I'm cross-posting to Bluesky and Mastodon and Twitter - but cross-posting a "thought" doesn't feel great.

Things like this: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lko5bg3c4s2...

I may have to invent a fourth content type for my blog (which is currently just entries, bookmarks or quotes) for this kind of very-short-form post with no link. Molly White started doing that recently so I may borrow her design: https://www.mollywhite.net/micro



... with the help of Gemini 2.5 I added that new content type to my blog. I've called them "notes": https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/26/notes/


Do you have any idea whether Substack drives traffic to, or sucks traffic from, your blog?


No idea at all. My blog does really well on Google, so I think if either site is being penalized for duplicate content it's probably the Substack.

It looks like 8% of my newsletter signups are "from the app" according to the Substack dashboard - which I think is how they show signups that they've encouraged as opposed to signups I had myself.

I'm really just using Substack because they've solved email deliverability and they're free for me to use to send out emails.


If you have a blog with RSS and just need something that auto-emails people your updates you can run my project on a raspberry pi. No need to tie yourself into the substack ecosystem if you don't want to

[0] https://github.com/MattSayar/rsspberry2email




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