Newsletter Refurb 2025-08-08
Browser improvements for both the Substack and Medium versions
Just a quick note on some long-overdue cleanup now that the newsletter has enough content to guide me on the next steps.
Prev: The Press Room
Why the Changes
New articles are will start rolling out on technical themes, and it was time to help subscribers to find the content that interests them. Performing some cleanup now makes it easier to just follow along with the new pattern as content is released.
What Changed
Both the Substack and Medium versions of newsletter now organize material into thematic areas. Those are “sections” in Substack, and “subpages” in Medium. The existence of these is visible both in the home-page menu and in the regions of articles displayed on the home page as you scroll down.
The thematic areas are:
Hammer & Anvil: Articles on the tech economy, which already contains several items.
Hot off the Press: Posts like this about newsletter features and usage.
The Laboratory: A new area for home office/small business tech experimentation. Not yet visible, but stay tuned as that’s about to change!
More to follow in time for data engineering, observability, AI and ML.
For Substack subscribers this will allow you to control which notifications you get. At the moment nothing is different. You’ll get all of the new article notifications, but you now have the power to exclude notifications for sections you aren’t interested in. In an Attention Economy, I’d just as soon let you enjoy some silence and not sift through unwanted inbox visits. Apologies to the Medium subscribers, but that platform does not have an equivalent feature for subpages.
The changes above will only be visually meaningful on a web browser. You likely won’t see a difference on Android app clients for either Substack or Medium. I don’t personally use an iPhone so I have no idea what the outcome is there, but I suspect it is much the same.
I tidied up the in-article navigation links on multi-article series to eliminate “View Series”. I already wasn’t using that to link to anything for Medium because Android deep linking doesn’t work in the Medium app for tag page URLs. With the migration to Substack sections apparently the Substack app suffers similar problems for section URLs, so that eliminated the last reason for a “View Series” text fragment to exist.
The Experimentalist : Newsletter Refurb 2025-08-08 © 2025 by Reid M. Pinchback is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0