It’s been quite a long time since my previous content creator workflow update, more than a year actually, back in November 2023. With 2024 coming to an end, it’s time for a detailed update. First, consider the following overall diagram, then continue reading.

Outlining purposes: Zavala, a free open-source outliner, is nearly perfect for outlining YouTube video production. I don’t do detailed scripting before recording videos, but I like to create the outline. I was using Zavala until the release of Mindnote Next, but this might change. Mindnote is a superbly designed mind-mapping application that also supports the creation of outlines, which are more beautiful than those created in Zavala. One of Zavala’s strengths is that it is free but also easily exports a document into Craft via a simple drag-and-drop. I will see how it goes in 2025.

Presentation purposes: iA Presenter offers a unique approach to presentation creation. I rarely use presentation software outside of my day job, but when I do, it supports me while recording a YouTube video. A recent update to iA Presenter introduced an online presentation sharing feature that works really well and is beautifully implemented. For 2025, I’ll try to take advantage of this. iA Presenter is such a unique take on a very old software category I must keep trying to find a use for it.

Website site analytics: Tinylytics joins Plausible in my toolset. I was happy with Plausible until this year, but the developer of Tinylytics is also the developer of Scribble.pages, a blog hosting service I really like. I decided to subscribe to Tinylytics as a support gesture for all his hard work building simple yet valuable web services.

Web bookmark management: I’m happy to introduce Anybox. Sure, it’s not raindrop.io, but it’s a great native Mac app, also available on the iPad and the iPhone. That’s all I need. My collection has less than four hundred bookmarks, all organized using folders and tags. It’s nothing fancy but practical.

RSS feeds publishing: FeedPress is a simple yet effective way for adding a unified feed in front of all my different websites (Ghost, Micro.blog, Scribbles, Medium). Also, I offer an RSS megafeed that encompasses all my other individual RSS feeds, which can be found here: https://feeds.numericcitizen.me. The added value of using FeedPress is to enable RSS feed analytics, which other publishing platforms like Micro.blog, for example, won’t provide.

Podcasting purposes: Micro.blog is now my podcast hosting service of choice. The feature is built-in and very simple to configure and use. There are two ways for me to share a podcast episode: either use the narrated post feature of Micro.blog or use a traditional workflow, build an audio file using Screenflow, post-process it in Adobe Podcast, and convert it from WAV to MP3 using Permute before uploading the audio file to Micro.blog.

Files-hosting and cloud storage service: Dropshare will upload a file to Backblaze cloud storage, and Short.io will shorten the resulting URL. All my files are shared under the following domain name: https://go.numericcitizen.me, using my custom branding. Here is an example: https://go.numericcitizen.me/PLx2st2Y. This workflow was implemented in 2024 and works well. The only thing is that I don’t use it often enough, and it can compete with CleanShot Cloud, which I use more often when sharing screenshots or short video clips. Those media files are using the following URL: cloud.numericcitizen.me.

Specialized blog hosting: Micro.blog. I created a metablog on Micro.blog using one of the five blogs in my Micro.blog subscription. As you can conclude, I’m increasing my foothold on Micro.blog because it is cheap, effective and unique on the market.

Read-later service: I removed Omnivore because the service is no longer being developed, and I decided to focus on Inoreader instead. It’s not a perfect solution, but it is a cheaper one. I still depend on Readwise to sync text highlights from Inoreader.

Another blog hosting service, Scribbles, was. I’m using it to host short-form posts called Blips or longer ones using the /Now spirit under the following URL: https://blips.numericctizen.me.

One-page website hosting: Numeric Citizen Hub on Micro.blog has replaced my Linktr.ee page. I’m again focusing on Micro.blog for many of my online publishing needs while saving some money along the way. This one-page website is for hosting my visitor card, sort of. Micro.blog offers support for one-page websites, so I’m taking advantage of this.

When saving bookmarks on Miicro.blog, I take advantage of text highlights while reading the article that Micro.blog is keeping from the bookmark. Text highlights are synced to Readwise, too.

Website for my supporters: For prople who wants to show their support for my work, I have built a Ko-fi page that can be reached here: https://ko-fi.com/numericcitizen. It was created for the one dollars a month club initiative from Manuel Moreale. I’m one of his supporter.

Document writing and editing needs: Craft & Ulysses. Both apps are still at the center of my publishing needs. More than ever, I depend on Craft to gather my thoughts and notes, research, and write. Ultimately, content is exported into Ulysses for publishing to either Ghost, Micro.blog or, more recently, Medium.

Behind-the-scenes newcomers: Apple Freeform plays a more prominent role in helping me create diagrams. Freeform is joining Mindnote and Keynote for creating visual content when needed.

These are gone: All my domain name registrations are now entirely moved to Cloudflare, and gone is GoDaddy. Omnivore is being phased out by its developers; it’s gone, too.

Until next time

The continuous evolution of toolsets reflects the dynamic nature of technology and the diverse needs of users. No toolset is flawless, and each comes with its own set of strengths and weaknesses. This notion is evident in your evolving content creator workflow, where you adapt and integrate new tools, illustrating digital tools’ perpetual state of change. For 2025, I don’t expect too much change in my workflows. Don’t forget to visit my complete content creator toolset if you are curious about the individual tools that I’m using.

This document is also available as a Craft shared document.

For those who didn’t know, I maintain a description of all the apps and services that I use on “My Complete Content Creator Toolset And Some More” page.

Bye bye Hookmark, apparently my current subscription ended. I cannot justify subscribing to this app just to be able to browse hookmark files created when my subscription was active. I’ll need to update some of my Craft templates to remove all my hookmark file references. Tedious.

I spent some time this morning to update my content creator toolset mini website. It was long overdue.

This article is about how I’m using Craft and Things 3, which is behind any short or long article I share online. Here is what happens when I get a new post idea.

1. In Things 3, Create an entry and set priority and desired or expected date of publication if known.
2. In Craft, I create a new document, set the title and then copy the document’s deeplink to the clipboard.
3. Still within Craft, I move the newly created document to the appropriate folder.
4. Still within Craft, I update my private creator dashboard document optionally.
5. Back to Things 3, and I paste the deeplink into the note field. It’s handy to jump from Things 3 to Craft with a single tap.

At this point, I can start my research, writing and editing of my article or blog post in Craft. Now, here is what happens after publishing my article:

1. Mark the to-do item as done in Things 3.
2. I update my private creator dashboard document by converting my deeplink to a new permalink that I put in the Recently Published section.
3. I monitor the appropriate RSS feed for quality control. See this article about subscribing to my own RSS feeds.

There you have it. Craft plays a central role in my blogger workflow¹. This blog post exposes what happens at the beginning and at the end of a new post idea. I hope you enjoyed it and maybe learned something.

If you want a peak at my current reading notes management workflow, you might find this video interesting (Craft, Bear 2, Omnivore, Readwise).

As much as I love Craft, its current version is unsuitable as a read-later solution. I do keep a list of bookmarks within Craft, but the article’s content is not fetched and saved into Craft, something Notion is able to do. This list is kept for other purposes, like helping me build my newsletter and other long-form articles. I need a better reading solution.

Reading is something that requires the least distraction possible. Safari reader mode is great. I use it quite frequently to remove the noise from a webpage, but it lacks the highlighting feature of Instapaper or Pocket. Using a shortcut to save a text highlight is possible but distracting. This is where an app like Instapaper or Pocket comes into play. But which one is the best? For me, it is Pocket¹, here is a quick comparison of both solutions.

• Pocket design is richer, while Instapaper’s is minimalistic, which could be seen as an advantage. Yet, Pocket is still frictionless for reading.
• Pocket updates are more frequent.
• Pocket is more expansive than Instapaper.
• IFTTT support is more extensive with Instapaper than it is with Pocket.
• Instapaper allows quick notes to be created next to the highlighted text. This could prove useful. Think of it as meta-highlighting.
• Instapaper seems stuck in the past when it was created by Marco Arment.
• Instapaper allows you to organize bookmarks into folders, something I wish Pocket would support. I’m a bit compulsive about organizing my content.
• Pocket supports iOS widgets, not Instapaper.
• Share sheet allows tagging with Pocket, which makes me more efficient.
• Page rendering seems better in Pocket.
• On the Mac, Instapaper Safari extension doesn’t work. It keeps asking me to authenticate with the application, which I did. See next observation.
• Both Pocket and Instapaper don’t support Sign in with Apple within the macOS application; only on the website. Because of this, the Instapaper is useless on the Mac, while Pocket supports creating a password for the account, which fixes this issue.
• Pocket offers a public profile page where article recommendations can be shared.
• I have more confidence in Pocket’s future and sustainability than in Instapaper’s.

The following screenshots are page rendering examples of the same article from both services.

If Craft is ever updated to extract an article from a website, allows tagging and highlighting, I’ll probably reconsider my use of Pocket. For now, I’m a very happy user of Pocket, a service which helps me read more and better.

My Pocket profile. My Matter profile.

My previous blogger workflow update was in March 2021. Quite many things have happened since then. It’s time for another update. Buckle up because this is a big one, and enjoy the ride!

What’s in

For 2021, I was expecting a year without many changes to my blogger workflow, and yet, I was in for quite a few surprises.

• Probably some of the most important additions this year are Toggl, Timery, and Focused Work to track my time while creating content (consider bookmarking and reading “Why and How I’m Tracking Time With Toggl” if you want to know all the details.) Tracking my time does take some time, but I like the results.
• Hello Ghost (again)! I started experimenting with Ghost during the 14-day trial period, during which all features were available for testing. I started building automation with the Zapier integration. After the trial period ended, the integration with Zapier stopped working for some reason. I quickly found out that many features like custom themes, custom integrations, and commenting support are only available with certain subscription tiers. Commenting on each blog post isn’t available by default unless I’m on the Creator tier and customize one of the provided themes. To use Commento, I needed an API key, as well as a custom theme and a custom integration. And moreover, a custom version of Casper with some script invocation was added to enable Commento integration. Forking such a built-in theme requires staying in sync with the official theme, as Ghost updates them from time to time to benefit from all Ghost’s additions. Finally, I visited Google Search Console to add my Ghost website for better SEO management and optimizations. I became a subscriber at the entry-level tier for $9 per month, but I quickly realized that the $25 was the one I needed (consider bookmarking and reading “Moving From Substack to Ghost–My Experience” for more details.)
• iPadOS 15 introduced support for Safari extensions. Working on the iPad now feels less and less a compromise, as Grammarly support and many other extensions are now available. For people depending on the iPad, it is a much-welcomed addition. Unexpectedly, in 2021, my workflow shifted towards the MacBook Air (read “Coming Out of a Rabbit Hole and Buying Two MacBook Air”).
• Pocket made a comeback in addition to Readwise (consider bookmarking and read “Instapaper vs Pocket — Which Read Later Service Is Better for Me”). Pocket is well-known and doesn’t need much introduction. According to Readwise website: “Readwise makes it easy to revisit and learn from your ebook & article highlights.” Resurfacing previously highlighted text snippets is fun and helps build a lasting memory of past readings. I added Readwise as a source to my weekly newsletter built using Mailbrew.
• Using the Readwise sharing feature to repost quotes on Twitter is handy. I don’t use it too often, though.

• WordPress plugin: I’m using the paid version of “WB to Buffer” for reposting previously published posts to Buffer. With another WordPress plugin named “Feedzy” it imports RSS feeds from Substack and Microblog and creates “Also on my …” type of blog posts automatically. It didn’t generate much traction and added too much noise to my original content feed. This was disabled after a few months when I moved out of Substack.
• I unexpectedly started using Matter when Matter officially became public. Matter seems to have gained some traction over Pocket as the best read-later service. Compared to Pocket, it creates great link posts that can be saved or shared online, just like Readwise and Pocket.
• I became a subscriber of Typefully (typefully.com), a web application for writing threads on Twitter. Some features of Typefully are similar to Buffer’s, like being able to schedule tweets. I use it to write threads to complement some of my articles. The latest example of things to watch in 2022. Finally, Typefully brings great engagement analytics.

What’s out

• My experience with HEY World didn’t last long. I’ve been moving out of HEY World to go to Substack for my Friday Notes* and Photo Legend* Series (consider bookmarking and reading “Migrating My Content From Hey World to Substack”). I can say the same thing about my Substack experience. These services, while attractive, didn’t stick in my workflow.
• HEY is no longer on the workflow diagram. HEY doesn’t really contribute to my blogger workflow. Most of my readings don’t happen there anyway, even if HEY provides newsletters dedicated feed, one of the tent pole features of the mail client.
• As mentioned earlier, Substack is out. The popularity of a platform doesn’t guarantee the popularity of your content.
• I closed my Telegram account. Read more here to learn why. I’m contemplating Signals instead.
• WordPress Plugin: Coblock was disabled to remove overhead in webpage processing. It didn’t make a difference, though.

In progress

• I do spend more time maintaining my digital garden in Craft all year long. You can find a lot of stuff in there.
• I’m still trying to figure out how to use Apple’s Quick Notes feature in iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey. I may end up having no use for this after all, which is too bad because, on paper, the idea is cool.
• I’m always thinking about using Apple’s Reminders in my workflow. Reminders have improved quite a lot over the years, but occasionally, I think Craft could take over if table support was better (sorting, tagging, etc.). The more things I’ll do with Craft, the more synergy it creates. I’ll watch Craft’s evolution in 2022, and maybe make a move.

Things to improve

• Adding text clipping in Craft would be so helpful. There are shortcuts that work with Craft that do just that, but I don’t find the experience very satisfying.
• Speaking of Apple’s Shortcuts, I do find more use cases for them to speed up a few key tasks, like setting up my work session after logging into my account on macOS.
• Templates in Craft to kickstart the creation of a new article would be very handy. It is expected in 2022, in an upcoming update in 2022 or via an extension.
• As much as I would like to see the addition of tags in Craft, implementing this feature could be tricky. Where should we be able to tag things? In a page’s properties, inline in the page’s content?
• I have to work on my reading workflow and decide what I’m going to do with Pocket, Readwise and Matter. Pocket will probably go as it is entirely covered with Matter.

Miscellaneous

• My usage of ** Craft ** has significantly increased this year. It is becoming my second brain (Fun fact: find out the name of my MacBook Air). Lately, I decided to use the Craft calendaring feature to prepare a weekly plan containing my content creation objectives. As the week progresses, I keep it up-to-date and check items off the list. It’s a satisfying experience, trust me.
• I’m still using Notion to keep my old data and connect Matter to Notion to save my reading highlights automatically. As soon as a Craft extension allows me to pump my data out of Notion, I might be done with Notion once and for all. Notion is not shown on my workflow diagram but will be in an upcoming post covering my reading workflow.
• Twitter Revue: I had a Revue account before Twitter bought them. Now that it is integrated into their platform, I experimented with it (read a sample issue here). I love Twitter Revue, but I have yet to find a unique and useful use case for it. I currently have five subscribers.
• Furthermore, I should consider closing my Flipboard account. I never go there; it’s not what it used to be, and I don’t get any traffic from this platform.
• Google News, where I cross-post my main blog content, could also go down the drain. I don’t get any traction there.
• Finally, Tumblr is another place where I cross-post content. Tumblr has become a ghost town in recent years, and it doesn’t help at all. Even if cross-posting is done automatically using WordPress’ built-in feature, I should consider stopping using this platform.
• In my previous workflow update, I considered moving my Photo Legend Series to Hey, which I did for a short while. Now, it is hosted on Ghost, along with my Friday Notes Series and monthly newsletter. I like consolidating stuff sporadically.
• Since getting a MacBook Air, my iPad Pro usage significantly dropped. The Mac is the power user tool. I cannot be as productive on an iPad.
• I worked a lot on my WordPress blog to improve its score on Google’s PageSpeed Insights, as documented here. Did it make a difference? According to my blog visitor statistics, the answer is no. Here is a strange thing: if I run PageSpeed tests twice in a row, the final score is quite different. Usually, the second try gives much better results. How much trust should I put in these results? Another observation: my score for this blog, a static website, is the worst. Is Blot hosted on a low-end performance tier in the cloud?
• I’ve been using Commento with Blot to add comments support on this blog. I never got a single comment! It’s a high price to pay for a service that nobody takes advantage of. Maybe it will be a better fit with my newsletter website on Ghost? Time will tell.
• IFTTT still plays an important role in my publishing workflow as it works with Buffer to help me control the cross-posting flow. Each day, I spend some time managing the Buffer queue to spread out posts to be published. I also use IFTTT to cross-post anything I post on Reddit to my Twitter channel on Buffer. Buffer has a new calendar view that helps you see a timeline overview of all future publishing. Buffer isn’t cheap, but I like what it does for me. Cross-posting content does help create traffic and improves engagement.

Well, that was a long one. I want to walk you through my reading workflow for an upcoming article. I read a lot of stuff online, and many applications and services are involved here. Reading is the source of my inspiration for most of my work as a content creator. I think there are some interesting things to write about. Stay tuned, and see you in 2022.

Getting ready for the upcoming Google May 2021 algorithm update. See how I improved my Page Insights score by more than 225%.

In May, Google will tweak its ranking algorithm again by including new experience metrics into the equation. Those changes were first announced back in May 2020. According to a recent post on Yoast’s blog:

In May 2021, Google will add Core Web Vitals as ranking factors in its algorithm. This means your site’s page speed and page loading time will impact your rankings.

And, from Liz Moorehead of ImpactPlus:

…these “page experience signals” will be rolling out in May 2021 as part of an algorithm update, meaning how well you measure up against these page experience factors will positively or negatively affect your rankings after this update takes effect.

After reading this, I was expecting the worst. I felt like it was like a storm waiting to strike. The feeling is not really cool, a feeling of “deja vue”. In November 2019, something happened to my blog visitors analytics: it dropped by more than 50% in just a few days. I was astonished and didn’t really know what happened or if I broke something with my blog. I did some research and found out that it was the consequence of a ranking algorithm change by Google¹, an update that put my blog at a disadvantage².

Preparing for this upcoming change, I had to find ways to minimize the impacts on my main blog, fearing I would lose traffic again.

The starting point

At first, when I started to look into this matter, I discovered the pagespeed insights tool from Google³. Don’t miss this insightful article about why PageSpeed Insights is an important tool. As you might expect, I tried it against my websites. According to this tool, my main blog didn’t score well, both from a mobile user perspective and a desktop user perspective, albeit it did a bit better for the latter. Both scores weren’t in the “green range”. I ran the test many times, and sure enough, on average, the scores were bad. Consider the following two scorecards.

That’s not good, but it serves as the starting point. I had to make improvements on all fronts. Does all WordPress websites need to be slow? They certainly have a bad reputation in that respect. As a Business Plan subscriber on WordPress.com, I get to run my website on its own virtual instance. This makes a big difference. Yet, the next steps weren’t clear to me.

Improving the mobile experience

The worst score shows that mobile users were the most affected. How many visitors come from the desktop, and how many come from mobile devices? According to my Plausible analytics, surprisingly, most of my visitors come from desktops, not mobile devices, as shown in the following table. Yet, the score needed some improvements.

A big change was to remove support for Google’s AMP page format. AMP pages aren’t the best idea for the open web and, according to my testing, made my website run slower. Disabling AMP support in WordPress.com is as simple as turning off a switch. After doing so, I could already observe big improvements in loading time, but that wasn’t enough to get my score into the green zone. What else could I do?

Revisiting my WordPress plug-in usage

WordPress is well-known for its support of plug-ins. The more plug-ins installed, the higher the possibility of a slower-than-normal website. It’s easy to have a plug-in overload. For my optimization work, I had to revisit the usefulness of each of them.

I simplified my blog’s main page a bit by removing a rarely used footer widget. This widget allowed people to subscribe to my Mailbrew newsletter. This change improved response time quite a bit. For some reason, the Mailbrew widget contained many scripts calling Mailbrew’s home, which increased latency.

The Twitter timeline widget was also removed; I don’t think people cared much about my latest tweets showing up there⁴. By removing the sidebar on the main page, content retakes the center stage in a cleaner page layout.

The IndieWeb support plug-ins (three in total: IndieWeb, Micropub, IndieAuth) were disabled because I suspected they could negatively impact the performance. After re-testing the website, the speed didn’t change much; those plugins were re-enabled⁵. Media Cleaner and Mailchimp support were no longer needed and were removed, too, but I don’t think they negatively impacted my website loading time.

Other plug-ins like CoBlocks, add a richer set of block types in the WordPress editor. This plug-in adds a few scripts and CSS according to my research. By disabling this plug-in, some of my posts would break, not that there are many of them but still, some care is required here.

Adding two optimization services to my toolbox

In “How to speed up WordPress”, I discovered two paying services: the first one is WP Rocket, to optimize many internal aspects of my WordPress website and Imagify to optimize images.

After reading about WP Rocket’s capabilities, I installed the plug-in. After installing the plug-in, WP Rockets does many optimizations behind the scenes without any intervention. Then, I poked around the provided features and started to enable options one by one, carefully testing my website at each step, as suggested in the plug-in documentation, to see if anything was broken. At each step, everything was loading perfectly. At the end of this process, I did a new round of performance testing using the page insight tool, and to my delight, my score went up even more.

In summary, the following options in WP Rocket were enabled:

• Cache / Enable caching for mobile devices
• Cache / Enable caching for logged-in WordPress users
• File Optimization / Minify CSS files
• File Optimization / Optimize CSS delivery
• File Optimization / Minify JavaScript files
• File Optimization / Load JavaScript deferred
• File Optimization / Delay JavaScript execution
• Media / LazyLoad for images
• Media / LazyLoad for iframes and videos
• Media / Add missing image dimensions
• Preload cache

All in all, I’m pleased with WP Rocket. The optimizations may not provide a night and day difference, but they do add up to make my website a better web citizen.

Next up is a companion service to WB Rocket, Imagify. It is simple to install and configure. The free version allows for optimizing 500 MB of image content. I went with the unlimited version so I could process all my published content. It took 12 hours to process about 5 GB of images. The end result is that my image library size was reduced by 62%. That’s a big improvement. As expected, optimized images look pretty much the same as before.

Other considerations

I considered using a content delivery network service (CDN), but after much thought, some internet research, I decided not to do so. My blog doesn’t use a lot of heavy content like videos, only some pictures and many screenshots. I don’t think this would have made much of a difference⁶ for most of my visitors⁷. The following is a Lighthouse test result for speed access according to geographic locations. The next graphic shows where my visitors are coming from.

My website performance by geographic locations

My website visitors’ origins

My WordPress theme is flexible and allows for many customizations. This means a lot of CSS is involved. I’m also using custom fonts that add some weight to the website. According to SolarWinds’ Pingdom tool, the main page of my blog weighs about 784K, where 40% is for the fonts, 27% for images and 26% for scripts and CSS. Repeated tests show the main page loads in about 3 seconds or less. This doesn’t fit with my observation when I’m visiting my website from my machine, which seems to load faster than in 3 seconds. Three seconds isn’t bad, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m not planning to undo my font selection, as the standard ones are ugly as hell.

Another step was to look at Google-related stuff. Since I’m using Plausible Analytics, references to Google Analytics were no longer needed and were removed from WordPress.com configuration settings found in the JetPack settings. Good riddance.

Final scores and looking forward

I’m happy with all the improvements I’ve made to my website. The improvements were the most impressive on the mobile version. It could be better, but I’m utterly happy with where the score stands now.

Keep in mind that WordPress-based sites are dynamically generated. A lot of processing happens behind the scenes when hitting the homepage with a browser. My microblog and the site you are reading are static-generated and fast to load. But, if you compare the loading times of all these sites, you’ll find that they are comparable.

Now, the big question: Am I ready for Google’s 2021 algorithm update? I think so. Will my optimization efforts be rewarded? Who knows? Google is like a beast that we have to feed, and please, who knows if he will like the meal served this time.

By increasing my website’s score for mobile users by as much as 225% and by more than 25% for desktop users, and by meeting most of Google’s requirements for “website providing a great user experience,” I hope that the upcoming Google changes in May will be beneficial.

Recently, I had a chance to read and participate in two different discussions about which app, feature or service is better for a specific task or use case. In the first case, someone was asking about Ulysses handling of Markdown links. The question triggered a really enlightening discussion about how Ulysses, and many more writing apps for that matter, was good or not at certain things like Markdown handling in general¹. In the second case, Lee Peterson exposes his disdain for being forced into using the block-based Gutenberg editor, replacing the venerable classic editor. Again, a simple blog post triggered a great exchange about where WordPress seems to be heading².

Regarding Ulysses, I’m a fan of its Markdown handling. The fact that I don’t see Markdown tags while writing is a big plus for me. However, I wouldn’t mind having the option to toggle this feature on and off so I can appreciate Markdown in all its glory. As for the Gutenberg editor, I admit I wasn’t a fan at first. But over time, it grew on me to the point where I wouldn’t consider going back. The block-based editor is also the approach Craft is taking, and it’s working its magic.

Ultimately, the beauty of these discussions lies in the diversity of opinions. It’s not about who’s right or wrong but about each of us finding the app that best suits our needs and preferences for the task at hand.

This is the first post on Numeric Citizen I/O about my blogger workflow. This website’s mission is metablogging, which means writing about the tools and services that I use as a blogger and content creator. I hope you enjoy the ride here. This is the most comprehensive update yet. In this workflow release, as of 2021-03, there are many important changes. Here is a run-down, in no particular order.

1. First, as stated earlier, I created a new website about meta-blogging. It’s called Numeric Citizen I/O, which is hosted on Blot¹. That’s where I’m talking about the tools and experience as a blogger and content creator. The domain name is hosted on GoDaddy. Domains ending with .io aren’t cheap, here are possible reasons why. I’m super happy with Blot. Their support is excellent. I learned how to properly use Git in my endeavour. I’m using Commento as a commenting service which is privacy friendly.
2. Linktr.ee: is now my virtual visitor card. Super easy to set up. Lots of formatting options. Not cheap, though. In the past, I had an account on about.me which I closed because of its lack of formatting features. I’m pleased with Linktr.ee.
3. Gone is the venerable MarsEdit on my Mac. Ulysses version 22 supports publishing to Micro.blog². I do like MarsEdit, but I prefer Ulysses which is available on all Apple platforms.
4. Gone is Linky, from my iOS devices. Used to be a great app for sharing links on Twitter and text highlighting. As my Twitter usage has dramatically reduced in recent months, I no longer need it. The app is no longer being updated, apparently, which is also contributing to its demise.
5. Now in: Nova and Working Copy for publishing to Blot. Nova was recently reviewed on MacStories.net. I think it is important to show support for those developers who care to create real Mac software, not just ports of Windows apps.
6. Now enabled is the automatic archive of my Micro.blog content to a Github repo. I like the idea of having my content available on Github. Using Nova, I cloned the repo on my Mac too. From time to time, I make pull requests to update my local repo.
7. Craft is my new note-taking application, replacing Notion. Read my recent article on Craft. I still have content on Notion and I don’t know ye how and when I’ll be able to take it out. I’m waiting for their APIs release. I’m in no rush.
8. Speaking of Craft, I’m using it to maintain a digital garden which can be found here. It’s super easy to nurture and the extensive formatting options of Craft allows me to have a decent website. You can leave comments by the way!
9. Apple’s shortcuts, not shown here, play a small part in my workflow. One of them is to generate quotes from a web page by selecting the text that I want to quote. Another one is to create a page in Craft from a website. It’s very handy and covers a use case not available in Craft but which is available in Notion.
10. I restarted my Vimeo page as an experiment and for storing short clips of user-interface micro-interactions from apps that I use and like a lot. You’ll find many examples from Craft. Vimeo is not cheap. Microinteractions are created using the screen recording feature of iOS, but are converted to GIF when needed in a blog post using IMGplay, an excellent GIF maker available on all Apple platforms.
11. I’m still super happy with Plausible, a Google Analytics replacement. You can have a look at my visitor statistics for this site, for example.

Under consideration

Reeder for maintaining a list of read later articles. I could use Craft for this instead. I created a page that contains all the bookmarks. This page is accessible from my digital garden, too. I like Reeder’s design for reading, though. Maybe there is a more profound problem: read later features like the one with Safari or with an app like Reeder don’t make me read more. I tend to forget about things I save in these lists. So, why give a damn about those app and service? If I don’t read an article that I find interesting in the first few hours or days, I’ll never read it. I’ll give myself some more time to think about this one.

Readwise: It is a fascinating service, but as my Twitter usage has dropped significantly, its usefulness is uncertain. Syncing highlights from Medium is interesting, though, because I’m a big reader of Medium content. The iPad app is lacking in certain areas. There is no Safari Extension that I’m aware of. Let’s see where it all goes from here.

A return of Things. Craft is able to export and import data to and from Things but not from Apple’s Reminder. The problem is that Things doesn’t have an URL field, which I depend on in Apple’s Reminder. I asked the Craft developers if support for Reminders was coming. It is coming. Things won’t make it back, I think.

Using Square on Linktr.ee to enable tips from my readers. Too bad only Square is supported, I would have preferred Stripes on which I already have an account setup to receive Medium payments. Furthermore, my experience shows that people don’t tip bloggers. Nobody really cares to support marginal content creator like me. Oh well, getting my rewards from the journey, instead.

Moving my Photo Legend Series to HEY World. I think it would be interesting to restart this photo series but this time on HEY World. It is super easy to publish, much easier than WordPress. That’s enough to consider this move.

Closing remarks

That’s it for this blogger workflow update. Things are starting to settle a bit. I don’t see major changes in the foreseeable future. I hope you made some discoveries with this blog post. Let me know in the comment section.

I bought Nova in support of real Mac software developers So, I decided to buy Nova, the best client for editing and publishing content to this Blot website using Git and Markdown. MacStories published a review of Nova just yesterday, emphasizing that Nova feels like a real MacOS application. I felt the need to show my support to Nova developers. We should celebrate great Mac apps. There are free alternatives like Atom or Visual Source Code, but they feel weird on the Mac.

Update: 2024-05-20: I no longer use Nova since I migrated from Blot to Craft & Micro.blog. I no longer need this type of editor.

I’m using Git to maintain this blog, which runs on Blot. Up until now, my Git knowledge has come from YouTube. Today, I came across this Git beginner’s guide that I wish I had on hand before starting this blog. The nice thing about this guide is that it covers the command line commands plus a GUI-based tool, Atom, in that case. I’m mostly a GUI type of guy, but it’s always interesting to see what happens behind the scenes when interacting with Git.

Editing and publishing on the go is a must, after all.

This weekend, I’m away from home. I thought I could get away with it and skip editing Blot posts on the go on the iPad. I was wrong. As I wrote at length here, the jury is still out on the best way to achieve this. For now, on the iPad, Working Copy is the best GIT client, and Ulysses is my preferred text editor. They have to work together.

So, I sat down and cloned the Git repo from Blot to my iPad using Working Copy. It took about a minute to complete. After confirming everything was set up correctly, I created an empty text file with the .md extension in Working Copy. From the Files.app, I tapped on it, and sure enough, Ulysses was launched. The file is shown in the “External Files” section in the library view. The publishing process went smoothly via a Working Copy commit followed by a push¹.

This blog post was not just created, but also edited, previewed, and published from my iPad, away from home. I guess I found a satisfying solution, and it feels great to have accomplished this.

Thinking about text editor apps. Following a recent article from Jason Snell about finding the best markdown editor for the iPad, I started thinking about using Ulysses for all my text editing needs. Is it the best tool for all use cases? Probably not. But it is cross-platform, and for me, it’s a must. As I write this blog post, I’m using Nova text editor on my Mac to start editing, finishing in Ulysses. It depends. I’m unsure how my text editor selection happens when I start writing a new blog post. Maybe I should do the same as Mr. Snell, build a table of much-needed features, and see if Ulysses still fits my needs. On my to-do list, I plan to write a blog post about GIT clients for the iPad. Working Copy is a very popular one and includes a text editor. Jason Snell’s article refers to Textastic too. They compete against Ulysses, but the latter doesn’t do Git stuff. Like many blogs, it may be okay to use a different text editor, depending on the platform. I could use iA Writer on the iPad for this blog and Ulysses for the rest. Or maybe Working Copy would be a better choice because I’ll need to use it to push updates here anyway? As you can see, I’m constantly reflecting on the tools I use or plan to use and my workflow. It’s a never-ending process. Back to Ulysses. For now. Update #1: I’m not alone in rethinking my text editor choices. Chris Hannah, too.

Using Git instead of Dropbox for Blot content syncing provides an unexpected benefit.

As I recently wrote, Blot supports two mechanisms for synchronizing content from my Mac to the web: Dropbox or Git. I chose Git. As I write this, I’m still testing Nova as the Git front-end (I’m a GUI type of guy). One of the great benefits of using Git is the built-in history of commits that is at the core of any Git repo. As shown below, as I push updates to my Blot-based website, I make sure to write a short comment in the commit action to document the commit action. I think this is an important asset in managing a blog and owning its content.

A better view at the GIT panel in Nova:

Setting up this blog with Blot was pretty straightforward.

It all started as an experiment. But now, it’s not. It’s something permanent¹. In less than a day, everything was set up and running. From the setup of the domain name (with GoDaddy) to having an actual site available for browsing. This is the very short story behind setting up the Numeric Citizen I/O website with Blot.

My interest in Blot came from the desire to have better control over the visual appearance of my microblog, which is hosted on Micro.blog. Micro.blog supports some customization but it’s too demanding as you have to have some knowledge of HTML, CSS and Hugo templates inner working. Another goal was to own my content.

Blot is a nice solution to my objectives: owning the content, easy visual styling, and easy publishing. Blot allows me to keep using my current applications like Craft for initial post writing Ulysses on the Mac, which supports Markdown files for editing. I had to select a GIT client to complete my workflow for publishing blog posts.

Opening my account on Blot was super easy. Before going further with any of the Blot settings, configuring my GIT client was mandatory. Cloning the Blot repo on my machine was quick and easy, too. Any non-fixable issues at this stage would have jeopardized the whole initiative.

Next up: setting up analytics, page structure, support for commenting blog posts, and closing a link format. All of this was dead simple to set up. But I wasn’t done yet. The next step was to select a visual theme. I wasn’t satisfied with the available themes, so I asked for support for help as I knew there were other themes available. After describing what I was looking for, the guy behind Blot agreed to bring back one of the decommissioned themes (for an unknown reason). In fact, it was the previously available default one. This closed the loop. I’m a happy camper now. I like this theme because it gives this blog a “scientific paper” look, and I love it; it aligns with the blog’s purposes.

Selecting a GIT client for the Mac is a bit harder than I thought. When I decided to create this blog using Blot.im, I had to select the synchronization mechanism between my Mac and the Blot.im service. Blot.im offers two choices: Dropbox (easy, seamless, but too invasive and bloated software) or GIT. I decided to use GIT, for a few reasons.

First, GIT is geeky. I like geeky stuff. This blog is about being geeky, so why not! More seriously, using GIT means that I have to select a GIT client on my Mac (and eventually on the iPad, too, for on-the-go publishing). The leanest way to manage content sync could have been to settle for the command line only. It is super easy to install GIT in the command line on the Mac. But, now, that’s too geeky to my taste. I prefer going GUI, being able to preview commits, file content, etc.

Here is a list of GIT clients for the Mac that I more or less tested with my impressions for each.

• GITHUB Desktop Client. I think this one is mandatory as it is the official Github client. Works fine as a GitHub client. Super easy to use but limited in editing functionalities, but I can configure it to open files in Nova¹. But it cannot connect to Blot.im GIT remote repo. Yet, it’s a keeper because of Github. It’s free.
• Microsoft Visual Studio Code. This one is impressive but also overwhelming. Do I need this complexity? Probably not. I don’t like its look and feel either: too Microsoft, not enough Apple-like. It’s still not optimized for my M1-based Mac mini, which is not good! It’s free. I will probably delete it from my machine.
• Tower. This one was mentioned by someone I follow on Micro.blog. It’s not free. I like the look and feel of this app. It’s clean. Works great on macOS Big Sur. But somehow, I find it less intuitive compared to Nova. It’s a fully native application (not Electron-based). Will be deleted.
• Sourcetree. Another GIT client but for Gitlab only (could not find a way to connect to Blot.im GIT repo). Still Intel only, not optimized for M1-based machines. No go. Deleted. Thanks to App Cleaner.
• Atom. It’s still Intel-only, sadly. It looks good, but I cannot connect to Blot.im GIT repo. It only supports Github.
• Nova. This app is well-known in the Mac community. They recently released version 5.0. It looks great: a tad busier and crowded interface and costs more than Tower. It comes with a local web server, so I can preview my Markdown file edits effortlessly. It also supports many file types (HTML, CSS, to name a few). It does support extensions to augment its features which is cool. I installed a few of them (Prettier, for example). Finally, Nova supports connecting to many types of servers (FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, etc.). I feel Nova will serve me better in my blogger workflow in the long run or could be used if I ever want to test a local installation of Hugo. Who knows.

As I write this blog post, I choose to settle on Nova for now. I’m still on the trial period. I have 18 days left. I can still change my mind. Meanwhile, if you have any suggestions, feel free to post a comment at the end of this blog post (not from the main page but by hitting the date & time of the post, which will bring you to the post page where you can comment).

In a future post, I’ll explore GIT clients for the iPad. WorkingCopy seems pretty popular.