I finally completed the replication of content from the Craft-hosted website to Micro.blog-hosted website. I initiated this migration to reduce my dependency on Craft to host such content. Numeric Citizen I/O still points to Craft-hosted website (https://world.numericcitizen.io/meta), but 95% of the content is now available on Micro.blog via meta.numericcitizen.me.

Am I leaving Craft behind, not anytime soon, but I’m certainly continuing to consolidate my online presence under more open platforms.

In the blogging space, “open” can mean different things depending on who you ask. There are open-source tools and services. Opening up yourself while blogging is another example. Giving a behind-the-scenes look at your workflows is another. Furthermore, being an open blogger also means a desire to write about writing and blogging.

Open blogging, a new movement (my creation 😃), also means creating, maintaining and sharing a digital garden. It contains many things like a list of upcoming blog posts, work-in-progress articles, never-published articles and other digital artifacts that you can find just by following links within the digital garden. You can even peek at my website’s analytics, too, thanks to Plausible. It’s all there. Just be curious.

Being an open blogger also means using open-source tools and services as much as possible. Such services include Ghost, GitHub, Plausible, Micro.blog and WordPress. I believe basic and foundational tools and platforms aren’t well served if big corporations own them.

Supporting open-source initiatives like Plausible, Commento and Ghost is an act of support for web openness. I subscribe or did subscribe to all those services because it’s like defending a principle (and because the services are of great value, too!).

On a more personal note, I easily and openly expose my anxieties about the challenges of being a blogger, writer and content creator. Isn’t the website hosting this article, its mission after all? If you’re someone who reads all my content, on all the platforms I use, you can build a pretty good picture of who I am, what’s my values, my interests, my challenges. Each website fills a specific niche but, taken together, forms a web of content reflecting my interests in life.

I like writing about my experiences. Did you know that between 2009 and 2013 I was developing iPhone applications? While doing so, I attempted to maintain a blog about it. I wrote and published articles about my experience my learnings of the iPhone intricacies. Today, I like to write about blogging, to share my experience with applications and services I’m using for that purpose. I like doing this so much that I created this website about it: Numeric Citizen I/O. I maintain a meta-blog that exposes the behind-the-scenes of my workflow. Different context, same objectives. It’s my small contribution to this complicated world.

Thanks for reading.

In October 2024, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Canvas, designed to enhance the writing experience. Before ChatGPT Canvas, one writing approach using ChatGPT involved compiling these references into a ChatGPT project, then starting the writing process by using a first prompt, followed by another, and so forth. With ChatGPT Canvas, the approach promised to be more user-friendly, more interactive, more natural.

I wondered which writing project I could use to test this new conversational experience. For a long time, I’ve wanted to write about the data protection and privacy features offered by Apple’s ecosystem for iPhone and Mac users. I had already started gathering references from Apple’s support website and elsewhere on the internet. It was the perfect use case for this experiment.

ChatGPT Canvas starts off with a prompt, as usual, but now you include the term “canvas” in the request. The rest of the experience unfolds in an interface split into two sections: on the left side is the writing conversation, and on the right is the evolving draft. ChatGPT Canvas lets you interactively edit sections of text by selecting them first before requesting modifications. It’s highly interactive; somewhat like working with an editor in real-time. It’s very stimulating.

With “Protecting Your Digital Life: Privacy and Security Measures for Apple Users”, I had the opportunity to fully test this experience with my previously mentioned article project. ChatGPT was central to this writing project, but I also revised certain parts by removing or adding some content and by adding details that ChatGPT didn’t consider important enough to include. The result isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely better than what I would have written from scratch. I hope you enjoy reading it, and that you find the article informative. PS, the diagram is mine, not ChatGPT’s.

This blog post idea was triggered by a similar post on from HeyDingus blog. Consider this a complement to my written interview on People & Blogs.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

It was back in 2009 when I decided to share my journey of learning to develop applications for the iPhone and the App Store. I wanted to write about this because it has been instrumental in aiding me in retaining information and organizing my thoughts in my mind. Moreover, writing has proven to be an effective tool for problem-solving.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

The first blogging platform was iWeb but it was more for sharing personal news with my family members, it was before Facebook and the like. More seriously, it was in Blogger, now part of Google. What a terrible writing platform it was. I eventually migrated my content to WordPress.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Following Blogger, it was Squarespace for a little while then I moved my stuff on WordPress and now on Ghost and Micro.blog. Oh, and I almost forgot Scribble.pages. I know, that’s a lot, but each of them serve its own purpose.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

I’m 99% of the time writing locally and hit publish after a dozen of iterations and some serious proofreading (manual, with Grammarly and ChatGPT).

When do you feel most inspired to write?

In the mornings, my mind feels unusually quiet and peaceful.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I let things simmer for quite a while for long pieces. Otherwise it’s a rather short-cycle process, mostly for short-form writing.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

Too hard to tell.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I’m super happy with my setup as it is now. I have all the things in place and I want to focus on that for 2025. There is always room for some tweaks and enhancements but overall, I’m settled for a while.

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.

I spent some time this morning to visit my documented tool set on my metablog to make some updates.

This morning, I added a guestbook to my blog. Please, if you’ve been reading my blog for a while or if you just came by, take a moment to sign it! 🙏🏻

The updated navigation structure on numericcitizen.me. This blog is hosted on Ghost.org.

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

❗Short announcement: I made some changes to my megafeed hosted on FeedPress by adding Blips RSS feed and this metablog RSS feed. If you want to get everything I share via a single RSS feed, this is what you need to subscribe to in your favourite browser. All updates to my digital presence are posted on this changelog page. Now, returning to normal programming. 📺

I decided to disable cross-posting from my Glass feed to Bluesky and Pixelfed. This should fix the photo duplicates on your Micro.blog timeline each time I post a new image on Glass. Sorry for the inconvenience. The problem was simple: Let’s say I share an image on Glass, Micro.blog picks it up and cross post to Bluesky and Pixelfed. Micro.blog then detects a new photo from my Pixelfed feed and cross posts that to my Micro.blog timeline for the second time. Hence the duplicate.

Each week, I use this template in Things 3 to help me out with my planning. Each Sunday, I duplicate the whole project and rename it accordingly. I love Things 3[^1]. [^1] I tried to do this in Apple Reminders but I prefer Things 3 experience.

I encountered my first few hurdles in transposing my content from a Craft document to a Micro.blog. Craft enables rich document content and supports block types like JSON output or command line examples. Posts containing these need special Markdown attention. Thanks to some help¹, I figured that out, so the output looks ok. Next up are documents with images like screenshots. When exporting from Craft to Ulysses, images are inserted in Ulysses as references to Craft’s backend storage. When posting on Micro.blog, the images are not uploaded on Micro.blog’s backend. I need to manually download each image and insert them in Ulysses so they get uploaded to Micro.blog and be self-contained there. If I ever drop Craft, I want the images in my post to stay valid and display correctly.

This blog is a Micro.blog hosted version of the Craft-hosted version. I’m currently in the slow process of copying my content over here.

Time for another workflow update (the previous update can be found here). This update probably contains the most profound changes in a long time. My journey with WordPress as a CMS (content management platform) has ended. It started in 2015, after closing my indie developer blog hosted on Google’s Blogger. There are a lot of moving parts. The dust is starting to settle a bit now. Let’s dig in.

As for the diagram, I wanted to make it more focused on digital tools and how they relate to each other, so I removed the devices representation as well as icons of apps that are better documented in my toolset (see down below). I kept the essential making the foundation of my workflow.

Bye Bye WordPress.com

Following the completion of my migration from WordPress to Ghost, I think it’s the right time for an update to my content creator workflow. This WordPress migration forced a reconsideration of many tools that I use to create. This post will highlight most of these changes.

Bye bye Twitter

Up until a few months ago, Twitter was really at the center of my online presence. It’s no longer the case. It’s (nearly) nowhere to be seen (except for searches through Inoreader). With Twitter out from my digital landscape, the following are no longer needed.

• Birdbrain, an iPhone app that allowed me to track who was following or unfollowing me.
• Buffer, a scheduling service to post content on Twitter. It was used to repost past content to stimulate exposure and traction. If I consider the price of the service, I don’t think the return on investment was worth it.
• My @Apple_Observer Twitter account is in read-only mode. My @numericcitizen Twitter account is also in read-only mode but is used in conjunction with Inoreader for searching and scrapping Twitter for specific content using specific keywords.

Changing reading habits

My reading habits are evolving too. Reading is the fuel behind my creative activities.

• Speaking of Inoreader earlier, this content consumption service appeared on my radar and was later adopted. It is replacing News Explorer, an RSS reader. Inoreader allows for much more than reading RSS feeds. Reeder (read my review here) and ReadKit are two RSS readers that I use alternatively to consume my content on Inoreader simply because these two apps offer a native experience on the Mac that Inoreader currently doesn’t offer. I’m still undecided as to which of the two apps I’m going to keep. That’s for another content creator workflow update.
• Gone is Matter and Readwise Reader. Since I’m mostly reading content through RSS feeds, these two services are no longer needed. I keep Readwise highlights subscription, though. It serves as an archiving service of some sort. All text annotations by Inoreader are saved to Readwise.

A more focused publication channel

• Content publishing services were also reconsidered. Medium is out. Spending time there’s no longer viable as readership is stagnant at best. Tumblr is out too. I was cross-posting content there, but it is no longer viable too. Even if it was an automated process, thanks to Micro.blog cross-posting ability and to IFTTT, it doesn’t make sense to maintain Tumblr as this platform is a walking dead.
• Back to the WordPress migration, for obvious reasons, all my WordPress plugins, like Yoast, are no longer needed. Many others were dropped, too, saving me quite a lot on recurring expenses. Yoast was useful when writing a blog post to optimize SEO content but added some friction and probably didn’t make a big difference for my SEO optimization aspirations.

Is my Craft usage fading out?

• My Craft usage is still important, but a few use cases were dropped. I don’t use daily notes to manage my things to do (as explained in this video “Why I’m No Longer Using Craft Daily Notes”). I went back to Things 3 for this. The other use case that was removed from Craft is bookmarks management, as explained in detail in this video “Why I’m Moving My Bookmarks Out of Craft”. Now, I’m depending on the excellent Anybox bookmarks manager, as I explained in this article: “Anybox – My Experience with a Bookmarks Manager”. Switching to Anybox also means I dropped Raindrop.io too. Even as a free service, it was redundant to keep.

Finally, since my tool set is always changing, I created and shared a Craft document where you can have a complete view of the apps and services I depend on to create things and put them out there on the net. You’ll also see tools that are under consideration and the tools that I dropped in the past. Link: https://world.numericcitizen.io/meta-toolset.

Following my departure from Twitter, as well documented here, it was time for me to make some changes to my blogging setup. First, as for my domain numericcitizen.me, I moved my DNS setup off WordPress.com to GoDaddy, so that everything is in one place. Plus, I have more control on GoDaddy than on WordPress.com. This change was required so I could add a subdomain, blog.numericcitizen.me and point it to Micro.blog, numericcitizen.micro.blog. My main site is not about blogging but about publishing longer articles on subjects that I care about, like Apple or general software and services matters. The change was easy to execute but took some time to go into effect.

https://blog.numericcitizen.me (blogging site on Micro.blog)

https://numericcitizen.me (main site on WordPress.com)

On Micro.blog, entering my custom domain name is mandatory and Micro.blog handles all the rest. Nothing is broken. Even the RSS feed still works. I also added a way for a reader to respond to any individual post by using a plugin named “Conversation on Micro.blog”. I had to create a custom theme, based on Marfa, for setting up the plugin. Again, that was super easy to achieve.

Finally, I made a tweak to the CSS setup so the highlight colour is more in line with my avatar: some kind of blue.

nav.main-nav a.cta {

background: #fff;

color: #548EB9;

border: 2px solid #548EB9; }

nav.main-nav a.cta:hover {

background: #548EB9;

color: #FFFFFF;}

nav.main-nav a, #footer a, #post-nav a, p a{

box-shadow: inset 0 -2px 0 #548EB9;}

nav.main-nav a:hover, #footer a:hover, #post-nav a:hover, p a:hover {

box-shadow: inset 0 -25px 0 #548EB9;}

With these changes, I’m ready to start the year.

It’s now been a month since this website was migrated off Blot.im. The question you might ask: is the website getting as much traffic as it did before? The answer is no, a lot less traffic. According to this post, I got about 90 unique visitors daily during the 20 months with Blot.im. Now, under Craft, I’m getting less than 20.

It’s hard to say why. Is the lack of RSS feed the reason? Now users need to come by often to see what’s new. I doubt people have time to waste doing that. The other reason might be that the new article posted here needs to be manually cross-posted on Twitter to get some exposure. Cross-posting to Reddit might help a lot as well, but the rules of many subreddit disallow self-promotion posts. Another factor might be that Craft doesn’t generate a sitemap, which is supposedly helping the Google search engine to process content. A quick search for something here works fine, though. The following Google search results for “my blogger workflow site:numericcitizen.io” reflect the updated website structure with the “world” subdomain followed by the trailing “/meta”.

I don’t pay too much attention to visitors’ traffic; it’s more of a curiosity. If you’re looking into Craft for hosting a website, I hope to make you pause and think again about the implications. This meta website is more of a long-running documentation project that I share publicly. I don’t mind about Craft not being too SEO-friendly. Speaking of SEO, the site’s current Page Speed Insights does not look good at all.

That could the other reason why this website isn’t performing too well.

It’s been a while since I shared details about my blogger creator workflow. From now on, I’m renaming it to “my content creator workflow” as it better reflects the coverage of my work. As you might expect, a lot has changed in a year. Without further due, let’s begin.

• Cleanshot Cloud has been added to my toolset following an update to the Cleanshot application. I think it’s one of the best Mac utilities out there. I even wrote a love letter. The most recent update brings screenshots history which is really nice.

• Raindrop.io is making a small comeback using the free tier for storing non-text bookmarks like things to watch. I didn’t subscribe to the service, and I explain why in this blog post “When War in Ukraine Influences My Application Choices - Numeric Citizen Blog.” I rarely use it, but when needed, it’s there.

• Notion was dormant since I switched to Craft until recently when I started to use it more often in combination with IFTTT. I use it to store information like popular discussions about Craft on Reddit or YouTube videos that I liked. More details in this YouTube video that I made.

• I became a subscriber of write.as as explained in [this article](https://numericcitizen-introspection.blog/friday-notes-63-i-writeas-myself/](https://numericcitizen-introspection.blog/friday-notes-63-i-writeas-myself/). There was a promotion earlier this year for a five-year subscription plan. I decided to make the plunge and give it a try. I’m using Write.as mostly when I’m musing about a very specific subject. The war in Ukraine has been one of those subjects. I like Write.as for its simplicity and its connection to Ghost, albeit without using it for every post.

  My write.as page.

• Matter is becoming more of a nice read-later service. I like it a lot. But then, the long-awaited Readwise Reader is coming into beta and looks like a serious contender. In Early October, I was finally able to try the Readwise Reader application. I like it a lot too, but it offers a quite different experience than Matter. Which one will stick with me is still unclear, though, like many things as I wrote in [this article](numericcitizen.me/2022/07/0…](http://numericcitizen.me/2022/07/03/things-that-dont-stick-with-me/).

• The Reminders app from Apple is removed from my workflow, as I’m trying to focus on fewer tools. Instead, I came back to using Things 3 for my weekly planning instead of relying on Craft’s to-do list and daily notes. What’s better than a task manager to manage… tasks? More details about this change in this YouTube Video “Why I’m No Longer Using Craft for My Daily Notes.”

• Vimeo is out, but YouTube is in for hosting a series of videos about Craft. I could see myself creating videos about other subjects too in the future. At the time of publishing, I made 35 videos so far, I currently have a bit less than 500 subscribers. My goal is to hit the 1000 mark within the first year of producing videos.

• I settled on using a few Apple shortcuts for storing web clips in Craft Inbox. I discovered MarkDownload, a Safari extension for downloading web articles in markdown files that are easy to import in Craft for reading and processing. CraftClip 1.3 is also in there for use on my iPad when I’m browsing the web and want to save an article for further processing and inclusion in Craft. My reading workflow is still in flux, though. I’m thorn between Matter and Readwise Reader. As described in my YouTube video, Craft plays an important role too as explained in this YouTube video “My Reading Workflow Using Craft”

• I closed my Blot.im account and move to Craft for hosting the Numeric Citizen I/O website, representing a 60$ savings that will serve to pay for the Craft Business plan. What if Blot.im disappeared? I asked myself this question recently.

  • A side-effect of moving to Craft for hosting my content is the loss of RSS feed support.
  • Blot.im was based on a GIT repo and for publishing I needed Nova, it has been removed from my workflow too as well as WorkingCopy for the iPad.
  • Commento was disabled and closed on all my blogs after closing my Blot.im account (another 260$ of yearly savings) and when Ghost introduced native comments. I was never or very rarely used by visitors to post comments anyway. What a waste of time and money.

I spent a few moments this week analyzing Twitter’s influence on my blog’s visitors analytics using Plausible. Why? Because.

Plausible · numericcitizen.me

Plausible · numericcitizen.micro.blog

Numbers show that cross-posting on Twitter brings about 10-15% traffic to my blogs. It is much lower than I initially thought. Closing my account would minimally affect my exposure. These numbers show that I should care too much about Twitter’s future. I should look confidently beyond Twitter as a content creator.

I’ve been making videos since early June of 2022. I wasn’t destined to produce content for YouTube as I’m more of a “written words” type of guy. So far, I have made 18 videos totalling more than two hours and a half of viewing time. Along the way of producing those videos, I learned a lot, and at this point, I feel pretty satisfied with my workflow. Here are my gathered observations and notes about my endeavour.

• Craft is a great application for helping me stay organized and support my video creation workflow. I’m using a template for each new video with things to do, research notes, documentation, video script, and post-process steps are all part of the template. I also maintain a table of past and future videos. I’m very happy with Craft in that respect.
• I did learn a few things about Craft along the way of producing these videos, for example, while preparing the video about explaining the differences between a document and a page in Craft, I learned that dragging a page to the navigation pane on the left portion of Craft main window, the page gets converted to a document.
• As much as I love my M1 MacBook Air, exporting videos using ScreenFlow can take up to an hour. It’s the use case that makes me wish I had a more powerful MacBook Pro.
• At Episode 15, I decided to use an external 1TB SanDisk SSD drive to store all my past and present episodes instead of my MacBook air internal drive. This way, I can plug the drive on my M1 Mac mini when I’m ready to export a finished video. Remember that a MacBook Air has no fan, and after 10 or 15 minutes of intensive use, the Mac will throttle down the CPU to prevent overheating. There is no such thing on the Mac mini; the CPU can run at max power for as long as needed, shortening the video rendering time.

• Having an external drive to store my videos also enabled me to use my Mac mini which uses an Apple Studio Display which brings much more space to work with while doing video editing.

• Doing the video montage on the Apple Studio Display helps a lot and helps me reduce the time it takes to create a new rendering.
• A typical folder containing a recorded episode contains the Screenflow document, the episode header image in full and lower resolution and the resulting .MP4 video file, ready for upload in YouTube Studio.
• Speaking of Screenflow: it’s a great application, but it is afflicted with a few bugs here and there. Updates to fix those are slow in coming. At some point, I contemplated the idea of switching to Final Cut Pro but doing so would still require me to keep Screenflow. So I’m sticking to it. Oh and I don’t like iMovie. Maybe I should look back at LumaFusion? But I don’t want to do production on the iPad.
• With each video, I’m perfecting something in my process or in the final product. My best montage can be found in Craft Doesn’t Need to be Notion and “Learn the Differences Between Documents and Pages.” I’m recording with a 4K Logitech Brio webcam, but I’m planning to use the Opal C1 webcam when the software gets more mature, and bugs are fixed. I’ll update this post after putting it to work and compare it with the Logitech.
• It took me a while to understand how chapters on YouTube work. Publishing from within Screenflow doesn’t export chapter markers (another Screenflow bug?). To get my markers exported, I need to first export them to an .MP4 file, then manually upload them to YouTube. That’s annoying.
• Google, unsurprisingly, offers a comprehensive plethora of analytics. It’s really a rabbit hole for those like me who love numbers. So far, I’m happy with the numbers, except for people retention. Surprisingly, people don’t stick around for a long time at my videos. Is my content that bad? Is this a major trend on YouTube or something that is closely tied to my content? Looking at my comments and likes ratio, these are vastly positive and aren’t indicating a problem with the content and the visual quality of my work. The retention time tends to increase as I produce longer videos.
• It makes a noticeable difference when posting a new video is coupled with a post on Reddit, Circle and Slack, as well as Buffer on Twitter.
• Being active on Reddit, Slack and Circle helps a lot to increase awareness about my videos, and I’m getting many new subscribers each day. On average, I’m getting about three new subscribers per day, which could mean that by the end of my first year of publishing content on YouTube, I could reach close to 1000 subscribers. This looks unrealistic. If I ever get past 500 subscribers, I’ll be happy.
• When I’m referring to one of my blog articles in the episode notes, I do get visitors. YouTube seems a great way to help grow visitor traffic.
• According to my Linktr.ee analytics, I can see positive impacts on visitors and conversion rates.
• Credibility seems to be building over time as I’m posting on a regular basis new content. I’m getting a score of close to a 100% likes ratio, which is a good indication that I’m doing good, but is this sustainable?
• I don’t pay too much attention to time release timing of a new video. YouTube processing into 4K takes forever. I tend to release a new video on the day after it has been uploaded and transcoded by the YouTube back-end.
• Most popular video: “Planning my week ahead using Craft Daily Notes.“ People are looking for productivity hacks, and I should probably do more of these videos in the future.

You can view a behind-the-scenes video here.