Needful Things
Everything, everywhere, all at once...
I’ve been investigating whether Substack could be a viable alternative to WordPress for Film Studies blogs. WordPress is ugly on iPads, is quite tedious to set up correctly, and — most egregiously — is increasingly unreliable at notifying me when new blog posts have been published.
So how does Substack fare?
Text
Normal, everyday, paragraphed text looks good. It’s readable, well-spaced and scales well to different devices. Bold, italics, strikethrough, links, and headings work as expected.
Bulleted lists are exactly what you would expect.
They can be triggered through the toolbar or by using a dash (-) and ended through the toolbar or with a double tap of the Return key.
Hierarchical structures are supported…
…with visual affordance for each level.
So that’s good.
So far, so much better than WordPress…
Numbered lists work similarly.
They are easily controlled and more or less automatic.
Hierarchical structures are also supported…
…and are also easy to distinguish.
So that’s good, too.
Generally speaking, everything can be controlled via the keyboard and all the expected Mac/iOS keyboard text manipulation keyboard shortcuts seem to work.
Quotes
Block quotes, to indicate passages that aren’t your own work, are clear and easy to insert:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.
Images
Posts support single images or galleries of multiple images. These can be uploaded, chosen from a selection of stock images, or generated by A.I. They can be captioned and resized according to requirements.
Video
Posts support three types of video — uploads, embeds and direct recordings.
Other stuff
PDF documents can be uploaded for safe-keeping:
Custom buttons can be created for important links:
Audio can be recorded inline:
Conclusion
👍