Preparing for Office Hours: October 2024

Let's see if we can't get the most from Tuesday's Office Hours session. Tools, Tips, and community. We're in this together.

Oct 06, 2024

As we shared when

and I launched

, this is all about helping each other be more successful, inspired, and productive in our family history and genealogy collaborations on Substack. It’s as simple as that.

A scary wall often stands between us and an unfamiliar platform. Don’t worry—you’re not alone. These office hours give us a place to make sure everyone is up to speed and to collaborate on family history and genealogy. I sense that they give us a way to erase the technology barriers. It’s hard to believe, but the next session is already coming up on Tuesday, October 8th at 10 AM PT, 1 PM ET, 6 PM BST, 19:00 CET.

We’ll have detailed notes and a recording for our members in Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. So, let’s get started and show you what I have in mind for this week. In the comments, I’d love to hear what you’d like us to discuss.

Let’s get caught up

Our Mission: Genealogy membership has roughly doubled since last month’s Office Hours session, so let me do a quick recap. At the start of last month’s episode, I shared a short video that walked through the basic terminology of the platform and shared third-party tips and resources:

After that high-level summary last month, we went around the room with questions and answers for each other. I learned so much from that approach that I want to use it again this month. First, in case you missed it, here’s the full post with notes from last month. Scroll past the video to review the tips. This is great stuff!

Need some help with that?

When we surveyed members in one of our first posts, some of you expressed a need for help getting started. Knowing how to subscribe is great because you can still get all of these posts via email, but when you understand how to create an account, you open up the community resources of discussion.

To help you out, I went back to a video originally done for Projectkin to explain how accounts work and how they relate to your identity as a “visitor,” “reader,” and “writer.” You’ll find that below.

This is an update for the video shared as an embed in my September post. I hope it’s clearer. Have questions? Drop me a message, or reach out via email.

This month

I thought we’d focus this month on the more subtle details of configuring the Settings for your Substack. If I can manage it, I’ll do a quick walk-through of the Substack Setting panel — and record it for this month’s notes.

If you have created a Substack “publication” (whether you intended to or not, it can be confusing), you’ll see a Dashboard setting in the upper right corner when you log into Substack. Here are the key steps so you can follow along with the conversation:

Tap the Dashboard button to see your publication’s current status display (blurred here as we’ll have a separate conversation about that.
Now, tap the “Settings” navigation item on the far right to enter the sometimes confusing world we’ll explore in the first segment.

This is where I see many people getting confused about the setup and design of their substacks. I plan to take about 10 minutes to do that, and then we can go “around the Zoom” as we did last month so that each of us can share:

Our name,
Our substack publication (if you have one),
The Substack issues or challenges currently vexing you.

⮕ Once we get around the room, we can discuss possible solutions.

I hope that over time, we’ll build a library of challenges and solutions that everyone in our growing community can benefit from. One tip: If you’re confused about how to do something, it may be that Substack has just changed how that function works. So maintaining an FAQ of tips & tricks could itself be problematic. That’s one of the reasons why this kind of discussion can be so helpful.

If you haven’t already, check the Topics section from the September notes.

I’ve already found it useful. That “post-lenth pop-up” was a big surprise to me. Did you learn anything new?

Will that work for you?

Do you have any questions or challenges to share in the comments before the Office Hours session? (I love homework. 😉)