#Substack is a global blogging platform with all the requisite social features necessary to make it popular for readers and writers alike. Slimlines is a small, independant website framework that can be used to create a wide variety of websites and standalone blogs. With the new Substack plugin, it is easy to use Slimlines to create an archival copy of your Substack newsletter. Read on to learn how to download your Substack archive and the Slimlines desktop application, and how to run it (no configuration necessary). The entire process, takes less than a minute.

Demonstration

To demonstrate what a typical converted Substack newsletter looks like, I've converted mine and put it online as an example.

Below is a side-by-side comparison of the main index pages for both Substack on the left, and Slimlines on the right.

Importing Substack

1. Download Slimlines (1.3 Kb)
2. Extract the downloaded file ( slimlines_nnn.zip ) into any folder. It will create a subfolder ( /slimlines ).
3. Go to the Dashboard Settings on your Substack website, select Import/Export and click on New Export. Within a few minutes your export should be ready. Download it.



4. Extract your Substack export file directly into the /slimlines subfolder.
5. Run the application ( /slimlines/substack.bat ).
6. View your Substack archive in your default browser ( /slimlines/open.html ).

Online Hosting

If you want to host your newly created Wrizzit archive on the web (for free), checkout the following article for simple instructions on setting up a web server and building your database. You'll use the Wrizzit database build file ( /slimlines/substack-db.bat ) instead of the one suggested in the article.

Blogging 101

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Have you ever wanted to create an online blog (for free), but didn't know how to get started. If so, I've got you covered.

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Tim Forsythe · December 4, 2024

Read More

Substack Issues

Not all Substack features are supported. Embedded widgets to Subscribe, Join the Chat, Send a Message, Install Substack, Leave a Comment, Refer a Writer, Start a Poll and Link to Survey, are not supported and will be seemlessly removed from your standalone blog pages. Other embedded widgets to Insert Audio, Insert Video, insert a Financial Chart and insert LaTeX do not include the relevant links necessary to include them, so they will be removed as well. Similarily, social interactions, such as likes, restacks and comments are not directly supported. If you want to add some of these features, the Slimlines distribution includes additional plugins for simple text searching, page likes, visitor logs and support for Disqus comments. To add these and other useful online features to your Substack blog, add the following to the top of the database configuration file ( /slimlines/db.xml ). Note: both the visitor log and disqus plugins require additional configuration changes. Consult the plugin files ( /slimlines/plugins/[plugin]/plugin.xml ) for instructions.

<Plugin> plugins\text.search </Plugin>
<Plugin> plugins\page.likes  </Plugin>
<Plugin> plugins\disqus      </Plugin>
<Plugin> plugins\visitor.log </Plugin>  

Fixing Author Names

The Substack engineering team did not include author name(s) in the exported blog index. Slimlines gets around this by extracting them from post digests when available, unfortunately, not all posts will be internally linked within your newsletter. Slimlines supports a couple of workarounds.

The first method uses Slimlines configuration to add missing parameters such as author name(s), hashtags and categories. To make use of this feature, you will need the Page ID of the post you wish to modify. Page IDs are shown in the build log when you run the application. You can add the following to your /slimlines/substack.xml file, save it and the rerun /slimlines/substack.bat to update your blog. Since page ids never change, you'll only need to make this change once. It will be reapplied whenever you rebuild your blog. For additional configuration options see <Page>.

<Page> 
  <Id>       Pnnnnnnn       </Id>
  <Author>   Bob Bobson     </Author>
  <Category> Stories        </Category>
  <Hashtags> Fiction, Story </Hashtags>
</Page>

Another method is to embed your author name(s), categories and hashtags directly into your Substack post. I find it best to include these at the very bottom. Author name(s) should be delimited by semicolons:

[authors: Bob Bobson; Mike Mikeson] [category: Stories] #Fiction, #Story