Hotkeys

Shift + N is a neat way to start a new post. I like. I also like that I can navigate away and come back to the same draft with nothing lost. Good stuff from the PCKT team.

One thing I wanted to test today was how easy it would be to port a different blog post on AT Proto over to PCKT. I have done no research into this to see if it's even possible. Here goes.

The other Platform is Offprint. It's basically a Substack clone in design, but built on the protocol. I hope me comparing Offprint to Substack doesn't bug the devs there... It really does look similar, down to the tabs at the top for one's blog page and the interstitial subscribe modal.

On this platform, I have two test posts. I have one on PCKT. Both are little testing blogs I'm testing out because, hey, it's fun!

Twenty minutes later.

Turns out, PCKT doesn't yet support a flavor of import. Offprint is much more robust, allowing import from Substack, Ghost, and other platforms. They also offer post syncing if you decide to continue posting on a different platform. PCKT feels like it's targeting the casual blog poster while Offprint feels like it's targeting the Substack, professional poster crowd. The pricing also indicates this. $4/mo versus $7/mo respectively.

I have an old blog called Feed the Sensor that was about camera tech. I haven't posted there in three years. Let's try an import.

Exporting from Substack is easy enough. What about importing on Offprint?

Wow! Import UI is very hard. The numbered tabs at the top are excellent. The greyed out sections for pages and readers is clear, though I don't know how I feel about not allowing reader import on a free plan given that the free plan can't do newsletter sends anyway. Why not just let them import so that they're more inclined later to get on a pro plan to be able to send to their existing subscribers?

Good choices on step two. I hope that the draft state preserves the original publication date.

Okay, okay the publication date is there in the review section. I'm hopeful.

Feature flagged for readers, got it. That makes sense. No complaints here. Newsletter sends is worth paying a subscription for.

Nice, a summary before import. Good dev team here really thought this through.

Heh, a server side batch process. Good thing it's not client-side. I have never made any client-side batch-processing functionalities... never... They always work perfectly, right? Right?

One thing that I'm left wondering on is if it's possible to use my custom domain on Substack as my domain on Bluesky, the why would I have a need for Offprint or PCKT? PCKT I see as useful for into-the-void style posts like this one. Offprint, until they have a way for their customers to collect payments from their followers for private newsletters, doesn't seem like it's ready for competing with Substack. Huh. I'm split here.

Just some thoughts.

The import worked. My original publication dates were scrubbed. I did not publish the posts, since it was primarily a test. Were I to do it again, I'd enable immediate publish with the hope that the original date would stay intact.