I have decided that my Substack is going to be used for my music posts only. I will post show reviews, Dicks Picks, and other officially released reviews, My Life in Music, and other music-related posts over there.

Initially, I thought it best to make those posts exclusively on Substack. The thinking was that this blog would be for movie and other miscellaneous posts. Then I thought maybe I’d do some kind of linking posts from here to Substack, kind of like I link over to my Cinema Sentries reviews.

After more consideration, I think I will cross-post those music articles on these pages. As much as I complain about not getting a lot of visitors to this site, I do get some, and they do often come from search engines and outside links. I don’t think that happens over at Substack.

For example, a recent show review for Bob Dylan got linked over at Expecting Rain, which brought in some traffic. That seems like a good thing. Plus, I figure some of you are interested in my musical writings but don’t want to deal with figuring out Substack. So you will be able to read them here.

If you have no interest in my ramblings on movies and other such things, but are interested in the music thoughts, then my Substack is the place to go.

I have actually posted a few music-related things to my Substack and not to these pages. I will post those articles to this blog soon.

One last thing: with my show reviews, I have started posting links to the show over at Substack. They are only available to subscribers. I will not be posting them on this site at all.

Let me know if you have any questions about any of this.

Please read to the end, or just skip to the last paragraph. I have a little experiment.

Ever since I wrote my first post about Substack, I have been co-posting all the things I’ve written here over there. It feels a little silly doing so, but I’ve been trying to figure out how Substack works. Or to be more frank, I’ve been trying to see if I can generate more readers over there. So far, that has been a spectacular failure. I still can’t figure out if Substack posts are detected by search engines or not. It definitely feels like mine is not getting any Google juice. I think to make Substack work, you probably have to pimp yourself out like mad on social media and other places. I’m terrible at that.

All of this is okay; I was just checking it out. I do thank those who subscribed to my Substack. I appreciate it.

I recently had this thought, though. What if I just post my music stuff on Substack and my movie stuff here on WordPress? I’ve been trying to write more music posts, but they feel a little at odds with the movie writings. Several of you have told me you have no interest in my movie writings – no offence, you say; you just don’t watch movies. Again, that is okay. Maybe some of you will come around if I write more about music, but maybe all this extra movie stuff will be obnoxious.

I like the idea of having a music Substack. I like the idea of doing more show reviews and digging into Dick’s Picks and similar things. I’ll still do movie reviews for Cinema Sentries, and I’ll still do things like the Friday Night Horror Movie, but I could make a bigger attempt at more music writing and less random movie writing. Separating the into this blog and a Substack might help.

AND, and here’s the thing many of you will be interested in. I might be able to do more ROIO sharing. Substack has some tools where I can make a post but make part of it only readable to folks who subscribe. That might keep out the bots who could bring in lawyers looking for a payout.

I’ve not dug deeply into how private Substack really is. I need to research that a little better before taking actual steps to share the music.

My idea would be to include the text file information about a show, maybe even link to posters, artwork, and reviews, etc., blah blah blah, and then at the bottom add a link to download. That part I’d make visible only to subscribers.

This is all very early days in my thinking about this. I can’t promise I’ll ever share like that, but it is an interesting idea (also, if you don’t already know, I have been sharing some stuff via email; if you are not receiving those, leave me a message and I can hook you up.)

Here’s the experiment. I just wrote a post on Substack (you can view it here). I have written two “hidden” sentences. The first is for free subscribers, the second is for paid ones. I’m trying to see how well that works. If you have already subscribed, please check it out and let me know what you can read. But more importantly, if you have not subscribed or do not even have an account, will you let me know what you can read?

I’ve been using ImgBox to host my photos for years now. They have been down all week. There is no official word (at least that I’ve seen) on what’s going on. I’ve seen a lot of talk online, and none of it seems good. Maybe it will come back, but my guess is they are just gone. Or if they do come back, I’m betting my photos are lost.

I didn’t store any personal photos on the site, so it isn’t a loss in that sense, but now I have to figure out what to use for the blog. I’ve started using ImgBB and that seems okay, but I’m not sure how much storage they give you. One of the things I loved about ImgBox was that you got unlimited storage and there were no ads or anything you had to deal with.

For now, I’m just gonna move forward. New posts will get images, but I’m not going to mess with the old ones. Eventually, if ImgBox definitely proves to be gone, I’ll try and go back and add in new image links. But that will be a massive project, as there are thousands of photos I’ll have to reupload.

Consider this an FYI.

I spent last week in Kentucky visiting my wife’s family. We had a very nice time, but whenever we go away for a few days, my mind keeps thinking about what I could be doing and how I might do it better. Inevitably, I ponder the blog. I’ve complained numerous times about not getting any visitors anymore. There are lots of reasons for this, but a big one is that WordPress and blogs in general just don’t get the traction they once did. When I started this site, blogs were popular; they were the cool thing. But that time has long since passed. People still run blogs, of course, and I suppose some of them are still popular, but the format has seen its day.

As far as I can tell, the cool new thing is newsletters. The kind of thing you get in your email inbox and read at your leisure. The most popular platform for this sort of thing seems to be Substack. Honestly, I don’t know a ton about it. I subscribe to several, and sometimes I read them. But mostly they just land in my inbox, where they sit for a while until I get tired of looking at them, and then I delete.

I do know that your posts also exist online in what really seems like a blog format. You can probably play around with those pages, but I haven’t messed with them. I know some of you receive an email whenever I post on this blog. All of which makes Substack sound not all that different than what I’m doing now. I actually started a Substack a while back just to kind of see how it worked a little. All I did was import this blog into it. It works very much like a blog.

I think the big difference is that you have better control over who sees what. Whereas WordPress allowed me to make the blog private or public, but that was for the entire site, not individual posts. With Substack, you can make one post public and another only available to subscribers. A lot of the ones I subscribe to have paid tiers. They offer certain posts for free, and others only give you a preview; then you have to be a paid subscriber to read. I don’t think I’d ever be popular enough to make anyone pay for what I’m doing, but I like that you can make certain posts private.

I’m, of course, thinking about the music. There is a possibility here that I could still write about movies and things in the free section and then share the music like I did in the old days in private mode. You might have to pay some kind of minimum subscriber fee, but I’d make that super small. But that’s a thought for much further down the road.

The reason I’m thinking about Substack now is that they do seem to be more popular now. And that could lead to more visitors. They also make it really easy to share posts. You can forward the emails to others or share them on social media, and the subscribe buttons are easy to find. In this day and age, that seems very important.

At the same time, I’ve had my old posts up on my Substack for a few months now, and I’ve gotten basically zero views. I don’t know if Substack can be found via Google searches or whatever. So this whole idea of mine may be trash.

So, here’s the thing. If I start posting to Substack, will you come? Will you subscribe? Would you prefer I move to that format, or would you rather I stay here? Do any of you have any thoughts on Substack in general?

We live in Shanghai back in 2007-2008. I wrote a separate blog called The Shanghai Cafe. It still exists as you can see. I want to import it to this blog just so that I won’t ever lose the posts I made back then (or forget about them.)

For one reason or another I can’t figure out how to import them to this blog, so I’m going to have to manually copy/past them here. I am able to set the date of the posts to match the dates of when I originally posted them. WordPress will accept that so they will exist in the correct timeline. But if you subscribe to my emails you will still get a new one.

I just posted one as a trial and it seems to have worked. But I then realized if you are getting my emails then you may be really confused. So we are not going to China again, but you are going to get a bunch of emails about those adventures many years ago.