{"id":6152,"date":"2026-09-24T08:55:45","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T15:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/the-war-diaries.com\/?p=6152"},"modified":"2026-09-24T09:32:41","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T16:32:41","slug":"ive-launched-a-substack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the-war-diaries.com\/?p=6152","title":{"rendered":"I’ve Launched a Substack"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>
Substack is a lot less clunky than WordPress in terms of how it creates handsome thumbnails and resizes promo graphics for you to help market your work on every type of device. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Mykonos\u2014<\/strong>This took me far too long to decide, but I\u2019ve finally joined the Substack online community<\/a>. I\u2019ve always been a late adopter to social media, in part because I\u2019m a late adopter to technology in general, from a baseline of being a fundamental tech skeptic. And truth be told, I didn\u2019t quite have a handle on what Substack actually was. Was it simply a new, sleek, purpose-built blogging platform? Was it a new rival to Twitter akin to Bluesky? What did the term restack mean? Was that like retweet? It seemed like a lot of it was behind a paywall as well. I was well aware that other writers and journalists were utilizing it as their new platform of choice while being vaguely aware you could somehow make money off of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many questions looked up via either YouTube tutorials or ChatGPT later, I\u2019ve gone ahead and taken the plunge to build one of my own. And I\u2019d like to add that for me there was quite a learning curve, owing partly to the fact that my skill set is years behind the curve since the global lockdown 5\u20136 years ago. I just haven\u2019t kept up with all these developments in social media and AI while living in NYC. Since I\u2019ve been here in the Cyclades, my mind has a renewed focus, allowing me to drill down and force myself to catch up on years of learning. I VERY reluctantly set up a ChatGPT account on Thera barely a month ago. It\u2019s been a topic of conversation at home in Queens and Brooklyn for the past at least two years, and I\u2019d purposefully kept my head in the sand. Everyone has been talking about the loss of extra work on movie sets, coding jobs at corporations, or most recently, how much water their data centers require. It\u2019s a good bit like cryptocurrency, where I kept hearing people talk about it seemingly incessantly and mostly ignored it until I finally looked into it down the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I must mention that when using AI in my areas of expertise, it is wrong about quite a lot, I imagine because the technology is still so new. Like if I look up something about the chronology of, say, 1990s Afghanistan, ChatGPT is often wrong. You then tell it it\u2019s incorrect, and it generates an apology to you. The whole thing is bizarre. But it\u2019s also incredibly useful for making thumbnails for Fabled City<\/a>, my modest YouTube channel. AI eliminates hours of effort in trying to do makeshift graphic design that in the end doesn\u2019t look all that great. Although its renderings are often a bit too over the top.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my month or so here in Greece, I\u2019ve been working tirelessly to get up to speed on literally years\u2019 worth of tech topics to the point where I\u2019m often overwhelmed and will have to take breaks. Step outside and breathe. Walk to the bakery to get a spanakopita.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I\u2019m learning the workflow of establishing and posting on Substack, I will say it\u2019s a fairly intuitive platform. But all throughout the process I\u2019ve been employing AI to accelerate my learning to adapt more quickly. Another facet of it that\u2019s just brilliant is how the social engagement is hardwired into Substack. Whereas here on WordPress, you have to install awkward plugins that eventually die off and don\u2019t function anymore without much warning. Oh, and also, Substack is completely free to set up, whereas here I have to pay my hosting company ever-increasing fees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m still going to keep TWD going as I have for the past 17 years and planning to use my new Substack account in concert with it. Hopefully one can help support the other and vice versa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mykonos\u2014This took me far too long to decide, but I\u2019ve finally joined the Substack online community. I\u2019ve always been a late adopter to social media, in part because I\u2019m a late adopter to technology in general, from a baseline of…<\/p>\n

Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6158,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nI've Launched a Substack - The War Diaries<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/the-war-diaries.com\/?p=6152\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I've Launched a Substack - The War Diaries\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Mykonos\u2014This took me far too long to decide, but I\u2019ve finally joined the Substack online community. 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