Three Apps for your Writing Tech Stack
Apps to consider for your writing tech stack. I find them invaluable.
Here are the central pillars of my online writing tech stack.
A blogging platform
Having a blog is an essential part of your online presence. It allows you to share your knowledge. learn in public, link your ideas and build an audience (if you have a newsletter as part of it). I write about that in The Joy of Blogging
There are two sites that I use - Substack and Ghost. Substack is a great blogging/newsletter platform. There is a built in audience, Substack notes is great as well. It doesn't allow you much leeway when it comes to SEO. (Read about what SEO is here).
Ghost is a fantastic site to write on. It's made for blogging, super fast, a lovely interface, great SEO. But it's harder to build an audience as you aren't writing on a site where ther eis already an audience. Here's the Ghost website ghost.org
I write about How to choose between Substack and Ghost here.
Obsidian
I also like Notion for note-taking. However, Obsidian is just fantastic for buiding a frame of reference and linking ideas. You can also publish it as a main site or a sub-domain. I'll be doing that soon.
Download it for free for use on one computer at obsidian.md. Bear in mind, it is addictive. You write a note and then you see the links and you want to fill in he gaps... it is like going down a YouTube rabbit hole but you are the rabbit who is doing all the digging.
Plausible Analytics
Stats from Google Analytics are so distorted by bots visiting a site that it is very hard to make sense of the data. I find Plausible Analytics to be much more useful. It is also better for privacy, it doesn't track people across other sites, so it saves you having a cookie banner (depending what else you're doing). This removes another tiny point of friction for readers.
It is a paid for service, though. There are open source options like Umami which require. wee bit of setting up.