🦊 Reviving the Open Web

One personal website at a time

Hey folks,

I haven’t been publishing much lately. After some reflection, I realized why: I miss blogging. I used to write and publish more freely when I blogged on my site salman.io. Lately, I’ve been focusing too much on Substack, and it has drained some of my creative joy.

I know most of you are not even on Substack, so perhaps writing about it to you is an odd choice. Nonetheless, it’s the platform I started this newsletter on with Quick Brown Fox #1 back in December of 2019, so it warrants some words. But if you don’t really care to read about Substack, just scroll past this first section :)

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Substack Struggles & The Death of Open Web

Here’s the gist: I find the platform’s direction confusing, and increasingly detached from its core vision of supporting writers. They recently added support for “Polymarket embeds” (whatever those are), and then doubled-down into video content with their own Instagram Reels-like tab. I also find their “Notes” product (Substack’s version of Twitter) to be noisy and uninspiring—it seems to be primary filled with notes about Notes itself.

I somehow respect platforms like TikTok even more now, because they are unapologetically themselves — entertainment feeds.

Substack seems to be having an identity crisis. It started as one thing, but then insidiously became something else. It now tries to be everything—a writing platform, a twitter-clone, an Instagram/TikTok media app, a podcast app, and more, all in one. I really feel like it has no idea what it is anymore.

I wish I could be more positive. But the more reflection I do on this the more my gut tells me that my best creative, insightful writing will come when I stop spending time in the noise machine that is modern Substack. I feel the urge to run away, to gift myself with silence and solitude for a while, and return to a point where I spend more time thinking about my creativity and less about the platform it lives on.

It’s not just about Substack, though—its evolution mirrors the changes we’re seeing across all social platforms.

A big example that comes to mind is Twitter. I used to write blog posts on my site and see them shared around on it. That simply doesn’t happen anymore. Twitter’s unhinged leadership has done its best to kill sharing of links. That policy is actively against the spirit of the open internet. It completely discards a vital function of discovery through curation.

We’re in an era of increasingly closed platforms and a less open internet.

We all have to decide how we’re going to respond to it.

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Going Home to Salman.io

I’m going to do what I can to push back against the walled gardens, and do my part to help revive the open web. It’s time I reverted to prioritizing my own site first, and putting these platforms second.

To kick things off, I published an essay Back to Blogging onto my blog, sharing a bit more on my desire to embrace blogging again:

I miss the open web. I want to be one of the bloggers, again. I like the idea of still working to keep the open web alive.

I still love this little website of mine. I want to tend to it, help it thrive and grow.

I’ll be sharing more links to my work here, so you’ll likely see more output overall, but curated into links. Hopefully this gives you more choice to dive in, and for those who want to hear even more from me, I think you’ll enjoy the extra stuff I send your way.

This change of approach might result in decreased engagement, especially as I spend less time within the Substack platform. I’m going to do it anyway. It’s a cost I’m willing to bear.

I want to use my creativity as a vote for what I’d like to see more of.

If you’ve been feeling the same way, I encourage you to revisit (or launch!) your own personal website. As internet citizens, we all have the privilege to build our own homes. It’s time we remembered that and reinvested in them. And if you have a personal blog with an RSS feed, send it my way!

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Nuts for Notes

Once I was back to working with my fast website publishing workflow, I published a flurry of notes in a span of few days (after not publishing a single one for more than a year)!

The beauty of a site is you can just publish anything you want, at any time. You don’t have to sit and fret over the permanence of shipping a newsletter.

Momentum is a powerful thing. Before I knew it, I had published a flurry of new writing to my website. Here are a few of them:

• Publishing Fables — Some rough thoughts on my findings from publishing fables in my book and online, and where I might go next with them

• Voice Acting — My experience with narrating my own book of fables

• Sites I Love — A short list of my fav personal websites

• Font Foundries — I’ve been exploring potential new fonts for an updated design, and decided to make a list of my fav places to get fonts

• Site Updates — A note where I’ll note all the site updates I make to salman.io (so meta!)

P.S. Did you know you can subscribe to my blog via its RSS feed? Note that this will only subscribe you to my blog of essays, not all my notes. This is by intention, so that the notes are more free-flowing versus the blog which is a more curated.

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Very Demure, Very Mindful Design Details

One the advantages of hosting my own site is that I can customize its design to express my personality. I’m no longer limited by a platform’s creative controls.

I want to prioritize my own voice, shared in my own internet home, and take advantage of my ability to customize the look and feel of my site. I want to express my personality through my site, like some of the wonderful personal sites that inspire me.

My website’s design—not just its content—becomes a medium for creative expression.

I made two fun tweaks recently:

First, I added a little hover interaction to the blog list, so that the post cards have their cover photos embedded as a gradient background. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out!

Then, I made a crucial tweak to my digital garden (a.k.a. my notebook of rough notes): I added a simple automatic list of all my recent notes, sorted by last modified date. This way, you can always see what I’m writing / working on, and I don’t have to keep a manual list updated (it gets updated on its own using my code source control system.) Shoulda done this ages ago!

All of these pages and changes are pretty barebones to start, but that’s the idea! Make a page with a few things on it, update over time, and voila.

The best example of an iterative note is probably my Writing Guide, which I’ve updated hundreds of times over the years with my own tips + my favorite writing advice from others.

Expect to see more updates to my site, and more links to it in coming newsletters! Overall, I hope to treat this newsletter more as a newsletter, linking to my blog and other places, rather than just a replacement of my blog.

Stay tuned for more on salman.io!

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Salman in the Wild

I was excited to see my book up on the walls of one of my favorite restaurants, Zareen’s. Check it out if you’re in the Bay!

salmanscribbles

A post shared by @salmanscribbles

Lastly: I was interviewed by CanvasRebel recently where I shared my process and thoughts on creativity: Meet Salman Ansari.