How to use the Substack editor
Hi Isaac! Hi J!
Hi! I’m having fun with this draft post. There are a bunch of nice formatting options in this editor and I’m going to try them all!
What is this? I clicked </> and it did this.
This is typing with strikethrough on.
The “ button created this block quote for me and I bet when I hit enter, the block quote will end.
No, it did not! Maybe I have to close the quotation marks? YES. When I did this, it automatically removed this graf from the block quote.
I typed this text, highlighted it and then hit the “ button.
Block quotes are a nice way to put a quote or excerpt from a source. They make it clear that it is a quote.
Of course, you can also do bold, italic, links, and all that good stuff.
Can I? Let’s try.
Bold using Substack editor button
It unbolded when I hit enter, which is good.
Here, I’m using the iPhone’s bold function and not Substack’s.
Does it look different?
Headings and Embeddings
You can have headings in posts. Just use the “Style” list in the toolbar.
So if I type this, I can turn it into a heading.
Yes, that was Heading 1.
Let’s see if the heading sizes go up or down. This is Heading 2.
Down. And it’s nice that the type returns to the standard size and style that’s being used for the main prose part. That’s not always the case.
You can also embed different types of content. To add an image, just drag it in here or use the image selector tool in the toolbar.
Here’s a copy/pasted photo:
Here’s the same photo, image selected from my camera roll. Whoa, when I did that, it inserted at the top. Let’s try again.
I must have accidentally moved the cursor the first time. Let me try embedding a tweet. This one’s really good.
Whoa, that’s awesome! Let me try some more kinds of content.
OMFG. I don’t know what other people think the song of summer 1996 was, but for me, this is it.
Here’s a password protected Vimeo.
https://vimeo.com/user36464571/review/734433214/a7a5c4ef90
OK, that didn’t work. Obviously, it might need to be a publicly-available video to do the embed, but I’ll try another way to be sure.
Ok, that worked! Here’s how I did it:
And then:
Spotify track:
SoundCloud embed:
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/v1Jc36b2zAkmVDnA6
Trying again:
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/qnHPKZ5WpzZC81XF8
Huh. I wonder what I’m doing wrong.
OK, pasting from the SoundCloud app was a little weird, but this is how I got it to work:
Noting that I was not able to copy/paste those two photos from my camera roll at the same time. I had to copy/paste them one at a time.
To delete a post, click on the Settings button (just to the left of Publish), and scroll down and find the delete button.
I’m sure I’ll be practicing this by deleting this practice post after I send it.
Publish – this publishes your post only to the web.
Publish & Send – this publishes your post to the web and at the same time sends the post out by email.
I’m going to hit Publish & Send on this one, since I’m pretty sure I only have two subscribers.
Once you have sent an email out, the only way to send it again is to create an entirely new post. Any edits you make to a post that has already been published will only be reflected on the web. So, there’s no need to worry about accidentally spamming your subscribers with repeat emails.
Especially since it’s so terrifying to think about a subsequently-revised draft being permanently archived, maybe I’ll use Option #1 for most posts. I wonder if there’s a “post it, get feedback, then send email (or not)” option.
If you import posts from some other site’s archives, you can backdate them so they are published in the correct order and associated with the correct publication dates.
Seems complicated! I’ll table this until I actually import posts from another site’s archive.
To do so, after you have published a post, go into that post’s Settings (just to the left of the Publish button) and select the desired date.
OK, this is getting advanced and this is, after all, just a practice post. This’ll do.