The Small Display Feature on Substack

Tricks and tips for making good use of it

Winslow Homer Girl and Daisies (1878)

Substack’s small display feature allows writers to provide a quick preview of the material on the other side of a link.

Simple Cures for Writers Block

Small displays also permit the building of navigators (for multi-part series) and aggregators (that help readers find articles on a particular topic).

Pardon My French

Articles about the World of Work

Authors can create a small display by pasting the URL for the article in question on a Substack page.

When you do this, Substack will give you the largest version of the ‘thumbnail plus text’ combination. (Marvelous to say, it calls this the large display.)

If, however, you select the little box to the right of the picture, you can change the large display to a small display.

Active Verbs

(If you paste too many large displays before shrinking them, you will get a message saying that your e-mail message is too long to be sent by e-mail. When this happens, dinna fash yersel. Shrinking the displays will often return your message to the good graces of Substack’s e-mail apparatus. (If such diminution fails to work, you will have to reduce the number of small displays you are using or remove some of the pictures pasted to the page.)

Please note that pasting a URL will only yield a large display when the movement takes place within the same newsletter. When you do this with a 'foreign’ URL - what might be called an outlander - you will get a box with a read more link in it.)

Making Music In A Time Of War

To make matters worse, Substack’s definition of ‘outlandish’ includes any other newsletter that you might publish on that platform.

The Study of History (Encore)

You can evade the latter limit by putting a page in editing mode and copying any small display icons that appear. (You can make this easier by placing a character - I usually use a period - under the small display and selecting ‘from the bottom up’.)

Thanks to this exception, I am able to add small display links from Extra Muros to a page from The Tactical Notebook and vice versa.

The Shape of the Study of History

Welcome to Extra Muros

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For Further Reading:

Making the Most of The Tactical Notebook