Hey everyone! I know this is a break from the regularly scheduled weekly posts, but I want to explain why, what I've been up to, and what's next for Next in Tech.
Since January, I've been taking this newsletter Next in Tech pretty seriously, posting general tech news recaps almost every Saturday morning, as well as longer updates or opinion pieces on select weekdays.
Posting so often has been a great practice for a few reasons. First, doing the research for opinion posts and weekly updates has made me more informed and has helped me work on ways to better tell stories, as well as to cover similar trends over the span of a few weeks. Second, expressing my thoughts and interests through writing was very helpful for me to organize my own thoughts, and to have an easy way to share them with people. And third, posting has helped me connect with others who are interested in similar things. For example, I asked on Farcaster if anyone wanted to look at a draft for what became my article Product Launch NFTs -- I ended up getting 30+ comments on my draft and had conversations that made me fully rethink my approach to the article.
But recently, I've been struggling to keep up with and enjoy my weekly posts. There were times where I had more to say or where stories were more similar -- either during one week or over a few weeks -- but recently it's felt like I've been looking for content just to make sure I have news to put out every Saturday morning. I feel as though there's no point in putting out content just for the sake of sticking to a schedule if the end result is going to be subpar and the experience isn't going to be enjoyable or make me smarter.
There have also been things I've learned and thought about that I want to expand on. I've had a collection of thoughts that I want to add to my personal website, so I can share ideas that are somewhere between a post and an article/thread, and am going to be adding them along with a few other data types like my projects and lists of cool or curated finds.
I also want to spend more time making videos, which I've always found an engaging platform and really want to sink my teeth into focusing on it more. I'll still write articles, but I think adding these other creative outlets will help me narrow in on what kind of content I want to be creating and how I can continue doing so -- not consistently for the sake of a routine but for the sake of getting better and being accountable for sharing ideas in a process that I enjoy.
In addition to the process of putting out and thinking about the content itself, I've been reflecting on the publishing platforms, processes, and analytics behind Next in Tech. For each post, I prepare a Twitter thread and Farcaster post, and I also post each article across Substack, Mirror, Paragraph, and dylansteck.com.
Keeping this process going is the most annoying part of the entire process personally, and it's always the smallest tasks that I need to do repeatedly. I've been posting to all these platforms to maximize reach(eg. Yup shows Mirror posts, my most email subscribers are on Substack, etc), but with one or two individual spike exceptions I don't know how worth it all this cross-posting is, and I rather post to one place(or maybe even have that one place cross-post for me).
Note: The analytics and process behind cross-posting is definitely something I'll expand on in another post, as it's something I'm still thinking through and I feel as though the topic deserves a proper deep-dive.
I had been thinking about taking all of these ideas into account and starting some new content with new updates to my site, but these plans were even further accelerated when I saw that Twitter had begun marking Substack links as unsafe. When that happened, I started only sharing links to articles on my personal site and started thinking that I should really get working on these changes. It also had me thinking that others might benefit from a similar setup, and connecting sites in a more craft manner could be cool -- I had also set out to create an example tutorial when I first launched my website.
And so while I'll still put out some content and roll out small changes to the site, I'm going to really spend the next few weeks building out some exciting new changes to the site, including how others can run their own personal sites with distribution they control.
Lastly, I want to say how much I dearly appreciate everyone's support. Seeing likes and shares on my posts and receiving comments saying that I should continue similar content are very rewarding moments and push me to continue doing this. I look forward to continuing sharing about this change and many more things to come.