December Office Hours | Tuesday!
Pooled talents and resources for best practices for using Substack to share your family history, refine your genealogy skills, and connect as a community. Join us for this last session of the year 🎉!
Our monthly
Office Hours session — the last of 2024 — is scheduled for TUESDAY morning: (Europe & the Americas)Americas: 10 AM PT, 1 PM ET
Europe: 6 PM GMT, 19:00 CET
Asia/Pacific: (WEDNESDAY) 7 AM NZDT, 5 AM AEDT, 2 AM AWST
December Short Topic: Tags & Sections
As I do each month, I’ll start the program with a short talk about how to organize your Substack to make it easier for your readers to follow. Discussions in our private member chat suggested that this would be a popular topic.
In thinking about the larger topic, I realized that there are three related components:
Publishing forms: Notes, Chat, Posts & Publications.
We touched on these topics in last couple of months, and if you’re fuzzy about this, I recommend you watch the videos linked to those program posts here:
If you’re still a little fuzzy on the details you can also take a look at the Support page on the topic here.
DECEMBER ⮕ Using Tags & Sections.
This will be the core topic this month and I’ll start with a presentation (we’ll record and circulate with the notes). We’ve covered the topic in discussion, but I thought a presentation might be a better way to introduce the discussion.
Substack presents Tags and Sections as entirely separate concepts, but I think it’s helpful to understand them together. Here are their documentation pieces:
JANUARY ⮕ How to Edit your Theme.
Editing themes (or re-arranging your Substack) is the third related topic and I realized it’s probably best set aside into its own program. Each of these are short and and recorded so you can follow along then discuss in our program.
Again, Substack builds on the ideas about notes, posts, and publications to describe the configuration of a theme. If you’d like to preview the documentation, you’ll find it here:
Gatherings!
In case you missed our earlier announcement, starting in January, we’ll combine our Office Hours and Roundtable sessions into “Gatherings.” This approach allows us to give everyone more options on convenient times and the flexibility to engage in deeper discussions. As with the current programs, only short presentations will be recorded and circulated as videos. The balance of the program will focus on discussions and not be recorded.
We’ll host the first Gathering on January 7th and 14th (then the first and second Tuesday of each month in the Atlantic region or the Wednesday in the Pacific.) These combined 90-minute sessions timed for the Atlantic and Pacific Regions. All events are free, and everyone is welcome (regardless of their home region.)
Explore the MissionGenealogy calendar at the link below 👇.1
Other updates
While I have your attention, a few other notes you might find interesting:
Shifting Scene on Social Media
If you’re a regular in Genealogy Chat on platforms like X, Bluesky, Threads, or Mastodon, you might appreciate the nifty new listing we’ve compiled of social media chat threads. You’ll find it at MissionGenealogy.org/connections.
Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments.
For the Office Hours discussion: Should we consider a scheduled-hour chat like that on Substack?
Finding Our Flock
My partner on
, of has launched a fabulous new program to complement her GenStack newsletter each Saturday. She calls it the GenStack Coterie. It’s a community designed for genealogy and family history creators who want to expand their audience, boost visibility, and collaborate with others in a network of like-minded creators.
Substack and the “Push & Pull of Platforms”
In discussions with many of you about how you’re using Substack, I’ve started to see patterns that I thought might be helpful to people who are new to the platform. The topic comes about as many people come to Substack from WordPress, Blogger or other blogging platforms and look to complement their work with engagement on social media connections on platforms ranging from X, Threads, or BlueSky to Instagram, YouTube, and Tiktok.
Special Event: January 9th/10th:
I decided to take this challenge on for the
. I expect this will be a series but with the support of two of our wonderful Projectkin members, Jennifer Jones of and Jane Chapman of BJNLSGenealogy, I have our first episode scheduled for January 9th/10th.
Like our other Projectkin events, this series is free. Learn more and register for the Zoom link.
Was this article forwarded to you? We’d love to have you join our events and subscribe to our free community:
In case you’re confused by the domain, the calendar is hosted by the Projectkin Community Forum (so we can keep all programming free.)