Letters by Burk #158: Where the Writing Lives
Hi friends,
a lot piled up since my last letter. Eight posts, and four of them turned out to be about the same thing without me planning it: the address, not the site.
A custom domain on Substack. A custom domain on Medium, which is the whole reason search became my biggest traffic source there. The platforms nobody would file under blogging. And whether a personal website is still worth building at all.
Then two on AI tools, one thought experiment about AI writing everything, and 19 conspiracy theories. That last one fits nowhere. I know. But I love it.
Here's my week.
If AI Wrote Everything From Today On… What Would Happen?
Graphite ran 43,000 articles through a detector and found AI passed humans back in November 2024. So half the experiment is already running. What I keep circling is where new information would come from, if every text came out of the same handful of models.
Connect Claude to Apple Notes, Reminders & More
Can Claude read a note and add a reminder on its own? On a Mac, yes, through small local MCP servers that already exist. Unofficial, a bit slow, and it works.
Blogging Platforms You Don't Think Of 2026
X, LinkedIn, Telegraph, Notion. Places you can publish 4,000 words on but would never call a blog. Which one fits mostly depends on whether you already have readers sitting there.
Connect a Custom Domain to Everything You Can
Substack, Ghost, Beehiiv, Gumroad, even a Notion page. Point your own name at each one and the URLs travel with you when you leave. The catch is that a new domain ranks worse at first, so it might get worse before it gets better.
19 Conspiracy Theories, Ranked by How Close They Are to True
Every one of them has one second where it almost works. I took each seriously enough to ask what it would actually take, then looked at where it breaks. Some get closer than I expected. Not close, though.
Medium SEO in 2026
Search became my biggest source of traffic on Medium, bigger than the algorithm and bigger than shares. What changed wasn't Medium. It was one setting, plus writing boring titles on purpose.
Who Still Needs a Personal Website
I keep saying writers don't need one, and I still think that. Developers are the exception. GitHub proves you can code. The site proves you can decide what matters and put it first.
Is There a Gemini Equivalent to Claude Cowork?
I called Antigravity "Claude Code + Cowork and faster" once. Not true, and that mix-up is everywhere right now. More than 90% of Cowork sessions have nothing to do with coding, which points at a different Google product entirely.
📎 From the Archive
Sits right next to the Claude and Apple Notes piece up top, except this one costs nothing. If you turned on Apple Intelligence, there is already a model on your Mac. Apfel is one brew command and you can talk to it, offline, on a plane, with Wi-Fi off.
🔧 One tip
If you have a Substack/Medium account, connect a custom domain to your profile. It's one setting, and it's the reason search is now my biggest traffic source there. Google sees stories.byburk.net instead of one page among a few hundred thousand on medium.com.
Do it sooner than later. A new domain starts out ranking worse than the subdomain you're leaving behind, and the only thing you can't buy back is the time it needs to catch up.
That's #158. Back soon. ✌️
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