Welcome to my Substack

OK so Pertinent Observations is moving again!

As I’m about to embark on a major life change (more on that in a couple of days), I’m taking the opportunity to change something about yet another integral part of my life - my blog.

The move

It has been over fifteen years since I shut down my first blog, and instead started blogging at noenthuda.com . However, as I had detailed in a post a few months ago, I have started getting a bit bored (or should I say “NED”) of WordPress, with its high friction for commenting and absolute lack of engagement.

It’s been a couple of months since I made this decision to move to Substack, but it hasn’t been an easy one. In an ideal case, I want to import all my old Wordpress posts here, and then even redirect the noenthuda.com link to this. However, that has been easier said than done.

The crib

Unlike Wordpress, Substack doesn’t allow you to bulk import using XML (you can only import using an RSS feed, whose depth is limited), and so most of my archives are not here. They continue to remain on noenthuda.com (until some clever person helps me figure out how to move the whole lot here).

So I’m in this odd position where all my new posts will be coming here, but all the archives stay in the old place. However, the limbo of the last couple of months (where I decided to move to Substack but didn’t really move) has meant massive NED to write. To the extent that friends have started messaging me asking if I’m alright, given I haven’t been blogging sufficiently.

What to expect

Just more of the same. Hopefully my move here will mean that my current limbo is over and I’ll be able to start writing regularly again. Again you can expect the same sort of stuff that I’ve been writing in the last nineteen years. This is essentially a public diary of my life, where I try to document my thoughts regularly. I’m a bit older now so I may not be AS slanderous as I used to be, but people who know me well will know that I still say what I mean and mean what I say.

What should readers do?

For starters, subscribe.

You’ll get the posts delivered either in your inbox or Substack app. You can even add noenthuda.substack.com to your RSS reader (if that is how you still consume blogs), and still get the posts.

More importantly, I expect you to comment heavily on what I write. Wordpress was like talking to an empty room (or delivering a webinar, which is essentially the same thing). There was heavy friction in commenting so nobody commented. I find substack to be far easier to comment on, so I expect you to comment.

Else I might put NED.