Substack Has Reserved a Publication Address For You
You haven't created a publication, but Substack thinks you will eventually and automatically creates a publication address using your account name.
When the new subscriber notification pops up in my email, the first thing I do is check their Posts. It only seems polite. And it only seems polite to subscribe back if they are focused on genealogy writing. I’m not advocating that everyone do that, because depending on how many subscribers you have and how often they post, your inbox could overflow with hundreds of posts each week. If you read every one of them, you’d never get any writing done.
But the majority of my new subscribers do not have a publication. They may be active on Notes, but they aren’t creating Posts. One of them is Karen Foyster.
But Substack thinks it’s only a matter of time before Karen takes the plunge and starts sharing her writing. Barbara at Projectkin noticed, “If you don't think of yourself as 'having a publication,' Substack has just changed things up again. Now, if you never created a publication, Substack has reserved your account name for a publication with a nifty little bit of 🪄✨.”
Using @genekaren, Barbara explained:
If you go to genekaren.substack.com, it automatically goes to the same place as Substack.com/@genekaren. It's not actually a redirect because the URL is different.
I expect it will confuse people, but I like to say they're "publishing under their account at genekaren.substack.com.”
Not that subdomains (the part to the left of the domain) are case-insensitive, BUT "." dots do matter.
In the directories (the part to the right of the top level domain, .com in this case) the text can be case sensitive... It depends on the site.
In email, addresses are entirely case-insensitive, and "." might matter depending on the site.
Go figure. Standards are important, but variations in implementations can make patterns hard to deduce.
But Karen has a profile. My brother does not, and Substack didn’t create a publication site for him.
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Thanks for explanation Deborah and for using me as your example.