Meta on Numeric Citizen I/O — A Blog About Blogging

Here and There

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:28:48 -0400

If it’s a very short thought, it goes here. If it’s a great link, I share it there, too. Any in-the-moment thing is here, too. When I explain why I do this and how I do that, it’s right here. Long-form articles or a new edition of my newsletter, well, that’s over there. Other written tidbits, not too short, not too long, well, it goes here, of course. I wish I could make this post stick to the main page.

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:22:57 -0400

Now that I manage all my issues and enhancements in GitHub Issues, I just realized that I could automate many manual workflows on issues closure… many interesting ideas here, like updating the README.md file once an issue is closed by Claude Code. 🤓

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 07:32:29 -0400

Restarted work for maintaining and updating the “Who Is Numeric Citizen” website, now that my 90% of my vibe coding work is completed. See the latest news post for more details.

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:16:49 -0400

Today I went ahead and fully migrated “Who Is Numeric Citizen” website to Realmac Software Elements Hosting instead of Chillidog Hosting service. Here’s why: A) Chillidog was recently sold, and people are already complaining about a decline in service quality. B) What Realmac Software accomplished with Elements in the last year is nothing less than exemplary. They built mature, native web design software for the Mac and a hosting service. I prefer to reward this company for this hard work.

The migration was really simple and took me less than an hour. The service is a bit more expensive but includes more storage and unlimited network bandwidth. This could enable a future option for hosting more photography-related content. Finally, the web service feels snappier, too!

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:42:52 -0400

I realized I forgot to clearly state the design goals before starting to build this custom theme for Micro.blog. They became clearer as I progressed and explored how Hugo and Micro.blog work, especially with assistance from Claude AI, and as I encountered various challenges. Here are the goals: a) I want a theme that stands out and doesn’t resemble typical Micro.blog blogs. b) I aim to minimize the use of external plugins, ensuring that all functionality is integrated within the custom theme. c) I want the same theme to be usable on more than one blog (I have two). Stay tuned for more news.

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:45:13 -0400

I recently decided to drop the numericcitizen.io domain name and focus on numericcitizen.me for all my needs. The former was tied to a Craft subscription that I’ll cancel, too. I prefer to manage everything inside a single space under a single domain. It’s cheaper.

What Happened in Recent Days - A LOT

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 22:33:48 -0400

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been on an intensive learning journey exploring automation, cloud deployment, and AI integration. I’ve been hands-on, building real workflows and connecting actual services. Here’s what I discovered along the way.

Getting Started with Automation

The foundation of this exploration was deploying n8n as a self-hosted instance on a cloud provider. This wasn’t just about clicking a button—it required understanding infrastructure, configuration, and the basics of running a service in the cloud. Once that was in place, I could start building workflows.

Building basic workflows in n8n taught me what it actually means to create a functional automation. It’s not enough to have a good idea; you need to understand how data flows through your workflow, how triggers initiate actions, how conditions branch logic, and how errors are handled. Meeting all the requirements for a working workflow meant learning to think systematically about each step and its dependencies.

Accelerating Learning with AI

One of the biggest breakthroughs was leveraging Claude AI to accelerate my learning across different subject matters. Rather than struggling through documentation alone or spending hours debugging, I could ask targeted questions and get explanations tailored to my specific use cases. This fundamentally changed how quickly I could iterate and experiment.

Claude became my learning partner—helping me understand concepts, troubleshoot issues, and even write code. This wasn’t just about saving time; it was about compressing what might have taken weeks of traditional learning into days of focused experimentation.

Building and Connecting

From there, I expanded into multiple directions simultaneously. I deployed Next.js apps on Vercel using Claude Code, which gave me a way to build custom web interfaces quickly. I integrated GitHub for continuous delivery, automating the process of pushing code changes to live services like Scribbles and Micro.blog.

But the real power came from connecting external services directly into n8n workflows. I learned to interact with Telegram, Discord, Micro.blog, and Tinylytics through their APIs, webhooks, and HTTP requests. Each integration taught me something different about how modern services communicate with each other. Some services have well-documented APIs; others require reverse-engineering their webhook payloads. Some are straightforward; others have quirks you only discover through experimentation.

The Deeper Challenges

The more complex problems emerged when I tackled data persistence and LLM integration within n8n. Adding state management to automation workflows isn’t trivial—you need to decide where to store data, how to retrieve it, and how to keep it synchronized across multiple workflow runs. It’s one thing to run a workflow once; it’s another to run it reliably over time while maintaining context and history.

Incorporating AI services—whether through pay-per-use models like Claude or subscription-based services—required careful consideration. I had to think about cost implications, rate limits, and how to structure requests efficiently. Suddenly, every API call had a price tag, and I became much more conscious of resource consumption.

Key Insights

What stands out most is a clearer understanding of tool selection. Each platform has its place, and knowing when to use n8n versus a custom Next.js app versus a direct API call makes all the difference. Sometimes the right answer is a simple webhook; sometimes you need the flexibility of a full application. This contextual thinking has become invaluable.

I’ve also learned to transpose ideas into concrete use cases, leveraging service APIs from Scribbles, Tinylytics, and Micro.blog in ways I hadn’t considered before. What started as “I wonder if I can connect these services” became “Here’s a specific workflow that solves a real problem.”

I’ve discovered how to make the most of services I was already depending on—Micro.blog and Inoreader—by understanding their capabilities more deeply. These tools had features and integrations I’d overlooked, and now I’m using them in ways that actually enhance my workflow.

I’ve also expanded my toolkit with utilities like VS Code, GitHub, and Postman, each playing a crucial role in different parts of the workflow. VS Code became my development environment, GitHub my version control and deployment trigger, and Postman my tool for testing and understanding APIs before integrating them into n8n.

The Bigger Picture

The journey has been about understanding not just individual tools, but how they fit together in a larger ecosystem. It’s about recognizing that modern development isn’t about mastering one tool—it’s about understanding how to orchestrate multiple tools to solve real problems. And it’s about using AI not as a replacement for learning, but as an accelerant that lets you learn faster and go deeper.

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 21:30:10 -0400

Enabled the RSS feed in the News section of “Who is Numeric Citizen” website.

Using AI For Writing is Lazy? Think Again

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 09:49:46 -0400

Some believe that using AI for writing articles is lazy, not creative, and that you don’t earn the credit for doing it. I disagree. Or, it depends. Here’s a personal experiment.

This week, I shared an article about digital sovereignty with my professional network on LinkedIn. Even if I used ChatGPT to write the article, I spent days on it, or, more specifically, I spent days creating and testing different prompts. The article was written in French, then later translated into English and shared on my blog (see “On Digital Sovereignty and Strategic Realism”).

In this meta blog post, I want to share the final prompt that led to the article. Please note that the final response from ChatGPT was manually modified before being posted. Here’s the prompt below followed with some comments.

I would like you to write an article of no more than 1500 words on the topic of digital sovereignty, a subject that is currently highly relevant both in Québec and around the world. This article will be read by information technology and cybersecurity professionals. It should offer a clear-eyed perspective on the issues and challenges related to the pursuit of digital sovereignty for organizations and governments. The article should not be alarmist, but realistic and critical, with the goal of prompting reflection among readers.

Here is how the article should be structured: an introductory section that provides context, followed by a section explaining why digital sovereignty is essential but not a fully realistic target in absolute terms; we must remain pragmatic. Then, a section offering potential solutions or realistic strategies that large organizations should adopt, especially if they are critical to society.

The article should conclude with open questions inviting readers to reflect and comment in order to spark a constructive conversation. Use the following elements to build the article. Reuse the provided links as references.

Over the past five years, a series of international, political, and technological events has forced us to examine the notion of digital sovereignty (a few examples: the rise of the GAFAM giants, the Snowden affair, the U.S. Patriot Act and Cloud Act, recent U.S. elections, mergers and acquisitions in the tech sector, etc.).
What exactly is digital sovereignty? “Digital sovereignty refers to the ability of a state, an organization, or an individual to control and manage its data, digital infrastructures, and technologies in order to ensure its strategic autonomy and security in the digital space.”
It is the ability to fully exercise one’s rights and choices in the digital domain without being subject to external constraints.
Major outages from several cloud service providers have occurred, the most notable being:
AWS (October 20, 2025: Revealing the Cascading Impacts of the AWS Outage – Ookla)
A Microsoft Azure outage (October 29, 2025: Microsoft Azure Outage: How the World’s Second-Largest Cloud Platform Went Down – ThinkCloudly)
And more recently, a Cloudflare outage (November 18, 2025: Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025)
Another outage occurred last year, on July 19, 2024, when a problematic update from CrowdStrike caused widespread service failures (2024 CrowdStrike-related IT outages – Wikipedia)
These outages strongly remind us of our deep dependence on cloud services and technology in general, both personally and within organizations.
We need to reflect and attempt to find viable answers and strategies to these questions: Are we well prepared? Do mitigation solutions exist? Is digital sovereignty only about data?
Is digital sovereignty a mirage? Are we not always dependent on something beyond our control? We must keep in mind that:
Complexity and cost: Developing sovereign solutions (cloud, software, artificial intelligence) requires massive investments.
Global interdependence: Digital value chains are globalized, making total autonomy difficult, if not impossible.
Risk of protectionism: Some fear that digital sovereignty could be used as a pretext for trade barriers.
Clearly, digital sovereignty is not merely about using or not using cloud computing, or choosing which cloud to use; it is much broader than that.
I really like this quote, and it must be integrated into the article: “Digital sovereignty is neither a luxury nor a technological gimmick. It is a pillar of resilience and democracy.” — Le Devoir: https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/936699/parlons-souverainete
I believe we need to accept the fact that we will never have full control over our digital destiny. Therefore, we must adopt mitigation and exit strategies to reduce dependency links.
We must maintain a message of independence toward major industry players so that they understand they are not alone, even if they are powerful. We need to be strategic, give ourselves the means to stay agile, and diversify.

As you can see, the prompt is nearly as long as the final product. It took me a dozen tries to see what ChatGPT could create. After each try, I would modify and add instructions to the prompt. Oh, and I searched for references myself. In short, this was a multi-day effort. Am I a lazy guy? You tell me.

My Content Creation Ecosystem - Fall 2025 Update

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 09:28:27 -0400

It has been a while since my last update in March 2025. Here’s a summary of the changes.

I removed Brief.news because I no longer think it will replace Mailbrew.
I removed Mailbrew because I no longer depend on it to consume Internet content. I tried to replace it with Inoreader email digests, but it didn’t work as I wrote here.
I decided to add ChatGPT Atlas because I now have a solid use case for it: articles summarization and analysis, as I explained in this YouTube video. This means Perplexity didn’t stay from my previous update. I’m focusing and want to settle on OpenAI for the foreseeable future.
My new personal landing page, which is mostly complete, has replaced the one previously hosted on Craft public documents.
I also made several visual tweaks to make it cleaner and more visually appealing.

The pace of updates slowed considerably in the last two years. It’s a good thing, and it means I can focus more on content and less on tooling.

Behind the Scenes of the “On Apple Failures" Writing Project

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 20:22:50 -0400

I’ve long wanted to write an article like this one. However, as Apple continued to add to its list of failures, poor Apple, I kept pushing back the deadline. This summer, however, the timing was right. Here’s what I did differently this time.

A few months ago, I started gathering a list of Apple’s failures in a Craft document. I wanted to cover the period from when Tim Cook took over as Apple’s leader, following Steve Jobs’ passing, up until now. For each failure, I wrote a summary that included a description, some context, and a list of potential collateral damage to Apple’s reputation and brand. Then, I turned to ChatGPT for help.

I set up a space to upload files, one for each failure, and began a separate “conversation” to explore areas I hadn’t already covered. This process took a few weeks. I’d revisit one of the failures every other day and continue the conversation until I was satisfied.

Next, I started creating a first draft based on all the conversations in this ChatGPT writing project. It took many prompts to refine the base content before exporting it as a Markdown file. Then, I set up a new conversation, uploaded the file, and asked ChatGPT to continue working on the article, this time in canvas mode. It took many more iterations and manual edits to finish around 85% of the writing process.

After that, I imported the text back into Craft and kept adding relevant facts and comments. As I went along, I started searching for photos that could illustrate each section. I used Kagi Search for all my image searches. For each photo, I wrote a brief caption that gave a unique perspective on the failure it was highlighting.

It’s also worth noting the role of Grammarly. As I finished writing in Craft, I used Grammarly to rephrase parts I didn’t quite like. I ended up keeping around half of Grammarly’s suggested rephrases.

In summary, generative AI was a significant contributor to my writing, either through the use of ChatGPT or with Grammarly’s constant supervision. I’m not sure how I should feel about this, nor how you should think about it, now that you know. Make no mistake, the original writing project idea is mine. The selection of Apple’s failures is mine. The starting point of research is mine. The selection of images is mine. Supervision of ChatGPT’s contribution is mine. But is the final product mine? Anyway, complete transparency, now you know.

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 17:27:28 -0400

I have always been torn between creating text-only quotes and image-based quotes. Text-only quotes are easier to resurface and index, while image-based quotes are more visually appealing. You’re preference?

Eternal Debate for Online Creators

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 12:02:02 -0400

While searching for blog posts on numericcitizen.me, I discovered a few duplicates and some that were no longer relevant. I removed the duplicates, likely caused by previous migration processes, and decided to unpublish the outdated posts. There seems to be a debate about whether we should delete past publications. Some argue that all blog posts, regardless of relevance, reflect our identity and showcase what we once considered important. Others believe that removing irrelevant posts, which they refer to as noise, helps the remaining content stand out. As I agree to both arguments, I’m allowing myself to do some cleanup, from time to time, and it’s ok.

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 10:56:58 -0400

Important additions to my generative AI usage rules: use more than one service, try paid version to get better results, prioritize cloud-based services. More details here.

Now on Chillidog Hosting

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 11:01:12 -0400

The Who Is Numeric Citizen? website has moved from Cloudflare’s Workers app to Chillidog Hosting. This change was necessary to support PHP, which is required for Elements CMS. Additionally, the publishing workflow is now more straightforward since I no longer need to use a GitHub repository, which was necessary for hosting a static website on Cloudflare. It is rare to simplify a workflow while adding more features, in this case, PHP to implement a CMS component on the News page.

The migration process was relatively simple, thanks to Chillidog support, which was fantastic BTW. The process involved republishing my website using a new configuration publishing setup, which pointed to Chillidog. The setup was straightforward because Chillidog is familiar with Elements, which allows you to download a configuration settings file directly into Elements for setting up the FTP connection. Once republished, I made a DNS change at CloudFlare to replace a CNAME record with an A record to one of Chillidog’s servers. After 15 minutes, it was a done deal.

Getting Ready for Elements CMS

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 07:55:35 -0400

I’m getting ready to use the upcoming Elements CMS feature when it becomes stable enough for production use. Today, I pushed out a big update to “Who Is Numeric Citizen?” website where I decided to split the Highlights section into four as I’m expecting them to grow over time. As for the CMS feature, it will require a change of my hosting solution. The website is currently hosted on Cloudflare as a worker-based app. I’ll first move the content to Chillidog hosting first, then I’ll start adding the CMS feature in those areas: site news, redo the best articles section and add a tech wish list as CMS entries.

Now on Ghost 6!

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 07:32:49 -0400

My main website, numericcitizen.me, is now officially using Ghost 6 which was released today. It was a short and painless process to upgrade. While Ghost.org will grandfather current plans, I discovered a price increase for my subscription tier (Creator), going from $25/month to $29/month. It seems that under my current plan, I can get all the juiced up analytics, which is nice. Yet, Ghost.org is a pricey service for a blogger like me.

My Official Response To Those Sketchy Offers

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 07:28:56 -0400

Because I’m getting email inquiries many times a week for SEO improvement offers, link insertion, ads, etc. I decided to create my official response for these sketchy offers. I hope they understand the message, provided that they read it, of course, which I highly doubt. It’s probably a lost cause.

An Update On My Craft to Micro.blog Migration

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 14:41:22 -0400

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.

I’m an Open Blogger

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 13:31:09 -0400

In the blogging space, “open” can mean different things depending on who you ask. There are open-source tools and services. Opening yourself up 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, such as a list of upcoming blog posts, work-in-progress articles, never-published articles, and other digital artifacts, all accessible 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 whenever possible. Such services include Ghost, GitHub, Plausible, and Micro.blog. I believe that basic, foundational tools and platforms aren’t well served when big corporations own them. Oh, did I mention being part of Fediverse is also part of my platform choices?

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

On a more personal note, I openly share 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, they form 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 and the lessons I learned from iPhone intricacies. Today, I would like to write about blogging and share my experience with the applications and services I use 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.

The Future of Writing? Testing ChatGPT Canvas for a Specific Use Case

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 15:45:24 -0400

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.

Blogging about Blogging — Eight Questions Answered

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 21:29:52 -0400

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.

My Content Creator Workflow & Digital Tools — Edition 2024-12

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 08:15:32 -0400

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.

An overview of my digital tools and workflows.

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.

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 08:46:01 -0400

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

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 07:52:18 -0400

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! 🙏🏻

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 07:01:31 -0400

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

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 08:07:05 -0400

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

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 08:49:43 -0400

❗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. 📺

No More Photo Duplicates Hopefully

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 19:41:37 -0400

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.

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 11:06:58 -0400

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.

Some Hurdles to Fix Already

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 18:58:45 -0400

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.

I want to thank MacGPT here for the hint. 😅 ↩︎

Let's start something new. Again.

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 16:59:41 -0400

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.

My Content Creator Workflow as of 2023-04

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 07:00:00 -0400

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.

CleanShot-CleanShot@2023-03-26@20.05.48@2x.png

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.

Image.png

Some Updates to My Blogging Setup

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0400

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.

Image.png

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.

Image.png

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.

A Month After Migrating Off Blot.im — Observations

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 07:00:00 -0400

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.

Image.png

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”.

Image.png

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.

Image.png

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

My Content Creator Workflow as of 2022-12

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 10:00:00 -0400

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.

Interesting Fact About My Twitter Usage

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 07:00:00 -0400

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.

Making YouTubes Videos - Observations & Notes

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0400

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.

My Blogger Workflow as of 2021-03

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 10:00:00 -0400

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.

My blogger workflow as of 2021-03.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.

From an idea to a blog post.

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.

That’s the website you are currently reading! ↩︎
The exact date of Ulysses version 22 is still unknown at the time of publishing this post. ↩︎

The First Post of a Long Series

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 07:30:00 -0400

Writing about my numeric experience isn’t new for me. When I was an indie iOS developer (2009-2013)¹, almost at the same time I started learning Objective-C, I opened a Blogger site called “buildingiphoneapps.com”². The idea behind this was to share my experience of learning a new language and a new programming platform. I wanted to share my discoveries, my challenges, etc. It was fun while it lasted. This website started my experience of being a blogger. So, today, welcome to Numeric Citizen I/O - a metablog from Numeric Citizen.

Meta definition according to Wikipedia:

Any subject can be said to have a metatheory, a theoretical consideration of its properties, such as its foundations, methods, form and utility, on a higher level of abstraction. In linguistics, grammar is considered as being expressed in a metalanguage, language operating on a higher level to describe properties of the plain language (and not itself).

Meta?

This blog is all about meta-blogging³. What? You might think? In other words, this blog is about the tools, services and workflow I depend on daily to build and maintain my online presence. I think that many people find it interesting to know how things are done behind the scenes. This is the purpose of this blog. From time to time, I’ll post updates when a new tool, application, or service comes into play. I’ll also document workflow changes or retired services. From now on, updates will be published here. While waiting for the next post and to get a sense of my current blogger workflow, consider the following diagram. It doesn’t reflect the presence of this blog yet. Wait for an update very soon.

Why?

But why use a separate website to write about blogging? I’m glad you asked. Here is why. Each of my websites has a specific audience and content type. Think of my websites as different specialized TV channels. Each of them fills a specific role or targets a specific audience. I think it is better for a blog to stay focused on its core subjects. Each website can have its own personality and visual theme to support it. That’s why.

Make sure to visit the About page for more details about this blog. You can leave a comment, too; I would be more than happy to engage in the conversation! To do so, just hit the post’s publishing date to see an individual post and add your comment at the bottom. Thanks.

I developed a password manager for the iPhone. ↩︎
I think part of this website is still available on the internet archive. ↩︎
WARNING This site is nearly ready to serve its purpose. Things will probably change a bit in the next few weeks, though. ↩︎

My Updated Blogger Workflow as of 2021-01

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 08:00:00 -0400

As a content creator, I’m always looking for new ways, tools and services to improve my workflow to be as efficient as possible. If something no longer fits my needs, I’m not afraid to make changes. The last update to my blogger workflow dates back to last November. Since then, I made quite a few important changes.

My Blogger Workflow as of 2021-01.

What’s in?

First, I added my Synology DS720+ as a central tool to manage my digital assets, mostly pictures used in my publications. I acquired this NAS last year to consolidate my numerical assets, and I cannot overstate how good this product is. The first use was to back up important files and archives later I added the digital assets use by taking advantage of Synology Moments, a photo library service that comes with the product. Read more about my use of Synology NAS here.

Next, an important addition is Craft. I’m still in the early stages of working with Craft, and I plan to write about my observations in the near future. Meanwhile, let’s say Craft is a similar yet quite different beast than Notion. It has a cleaner and really polished design and helps me gather digitals tidbits, write and organize my thoughts. You can have a look at a few micro-interaction examples with Craft on my Vimeo page. I don’t plan to kick out Notion from my workflow yet. Notion is much more powerful than Craft. I think there is a place for both of them in my toolset.

Speaking of Vimeo, I’m back for another year as a paying subscriber. I much prefer Vimeo to YouTube (you know my stance on data privacy protection and Google, right?). I used Vimeo to publish a video about why I’ll never be a YouTuber. I’m also creating a collection of short clips of great micro-interactions with apps. Craft is one of the collections. My Vimeo profile page is here.

To create short animation clips in my publications, I use GIF files. Those are created from video clips and then converted to animated GIFs using the powerful ImgPlay application available on iOS, iPadOs and macOS Big Sur (thanks to the M1-powered Macs!). For me, it’s the best animated GIF creation application out there. Think of ImgPlay as a Final Cut Pro but for animated GIF creation.

Finally, the diagram doesn’t show my use of Apple’s Shortcuts to automate many repetitive tasks. One shortcut is used to add a device frame to any screenshots. Screenshots are prettier this way. Another shortcut saves interesting links into Apple’s Reminders app for future link posts. Finally, another one is used to create an archive of my microblog front page from time to time using Newsy.

Example of my microblog front page screenshot created from a shortcut.

What’s out?

Google Analytics is out, thanks to Plausible, a great alternative. I wrote about my switch recently and decided to walk the talk regarding my stance on data privacy protection. While not as powerful as Google Analytics, it does the job quite well for my basic needs. Since closing my Google Analytics, Databox was no longer needed.

A mature workflow

After many updates in the last 18 months, I think my blogger workflow is in an equilibrium and mature state. We never know when a new application or service pops up and can make a difference for me as a content creator looking for efficiency. That being said, I don’t expect much change for the foreseeable future.

My Updated Blogger Workflow as of 2020-11

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 08:00:00 -0400

It’s been a while since I updated my blogger workflow. The last time was back in September of 2020. It’s time for some tweaks.

The number of services I pay for has increased. Now, I’m paying for IFTTT and Buffer. IFTTT has improved its offerings this year and started to offer a paid tier. I recently added an automation where new posts from my Micro.blog RSS feed will get saved to a Google Sheet document. It makes it much easier to find previous post references when working on my Numeric Citizen Introspection newsletter.

Archives of references to my Micro.blog posts.

I’m paying for Buffer because of the added features I get in return. I get more channels and better post-management. All of my blog posts are now queued to Buffer. From there, I can choose when my blog post will be reposted. Sometimes, I may elect not to repost some of my work. Another use of Buffer is when an Apple event comes up. I will schedule tweets in advance. On the event day, I can focus on the event itself. It’s working fine for me this way.

The other addition is in fact a return of an old buddy: Reeder 5, the venerable RSS feed reader. I’m still depending on News Explorer (read my review here). I’m using Reeder 5 because of the Read Later feature, where I put all my internet articles that I want to eventually read. It works great, supports tags and runs on all Apple platforms.

Reeder 5 Read Later view.

Probably on the way out is MarsEdit. It’s not that the app is bad; quite the contrary. What I’m looking for is to consolidate my writing apps. Ulysses is rumoured to introduce support for Micro.blog beginning of next year. If that’s the case, I’ll drop MarsEdit.

In the next few weeks, I’m looking forward to Apple finally approving my submission of this blog for publication on Apple News. They recently updated their review process and asked all content creators to resubmit their articles and answer questionnaires. We’ll see.

Finally, I updated the general look of the diagram to make it easier on the eyes. I hope you’ll like it! Are you a blogger too or a content creator? What is your workflow?

My Updated Blogger Workflow as of 2020-09

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0400

Since the last update to my blogger workflow, Substack has been an important addition. Here is why and how I’m using Substack, a content publishing platform that is gaining traction for writers and bloggers like me.

Why Substack?

As you probably know, I recently started something new: a monthly newsletter about Apple, photography, privacy protection and climate change. I could have done it with Mailchimp or other similar services. Substack is free. For a few months, I’ve been paying attention to a nascent publishing platform named Substack. I do see more and more bloggers and writers publishing on it. One example is M. G. Siegler with 5ish.org.

I’m using Notion to gather my highlights during the month, coming from the usual sources and generated newsletters I get from Mailbrew. When the end of the month arrives, I go to my desk, sit down and do my write-up on my iMac. There is no native iPadOS app for Substack. Yet. This doesn’t bother me too much because it forces me to do it in a stretch. The newsletter is sent in the first week of every month. A link is cross-posted to Micro.blog.

Expect a review of Substack in the coming weeks, but first I need to gain more experience and insights into this service. Stay tuned for that one.

Cleanup required

Some cleanup had to be done too. I decided to remove any references and cross-posting to Reddit as it doesn’t generate traffic at all. Reddit is a special place (a jungle?), and I’m not sure if it fits me. Lastly, I’m still waiting for Apple News to approve my submission of this blog as a publication. It’s been months since I submitted my blog for review. I asked for support on the Publisher portal available on my icloud.com page. My expectations are low. I do hear here and there that Apple has become picky about which publication they allow. My fingers are crossed.

Finally, I wanted to update you about the visitor trend for this blog. The following graph shows sign of a slow and painful recovery following Google’s algorithms changes last November.

Recovery for this blog’s wound caused by Google is long.

My Updated Blogger Workflow as of 2020-08

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0400

A few important additions have occurred since my last update to my blogger workflow. Here is my updated blogger workflow as of 2020-08.

My blogger workflow as of 2020-08

The arrival of the controversial HEY email service has enhanced how I consume information. I recently published my thoughts on HEY. I’m happy to report HEY is now joining other important apps and services like News Explorer and Mailbrew. Who knew emails could become part of my information consumption routine? HEY combined with Mailbrew forms a killer combination.

WordPress application keeps receiving significant updates every few weeks. They are essentially bringing the block editor experience into the mobile app and adding nice touches here and there.

My favourite writing application, Ulysses, received a major update, V20, that brings a dashboard which groups a statistics panel, a text navigator, a comment section, and a media overview, among other things. Ulysses also includes a spell checker on macOS that is still unavailable on iOS but will come later this year. This addition could make me reconsider my use of Grammarly. All the details are available here.

On the subject of Grammarly, with the updated Safari in macOS Big Sur supporting extensions, my hope is to see a version of Grammarly introduced later this year. Still, regarding extensions, the same expectation is for Notion to support Safari.

Another addition, not pictured on the diagram, is the use of Apple’s Shortcuts with Reminders to created to-dos to remind me of bits of informations I want to write about. I’m using new features of Reminders shortcut support in iOS 14 for this. Oops. Works like a charm.

Finally, MarsEdit was updated to version 4.4 which bring full support of the Micro.blog platform for writing and posting directly from the application. I was testing the beta, and it works great.

If you are a blogger and use additional tools that are time savers for you, please let me know in the comment section below. Thanks!

My Updated Blogger Workflow as of 2020-05

Fri, 01 May 2020 13:00:00 -0400

Quite a few things have happened since my previous blogger workflow update in March. Mailbrew is in, Apple News is out, forgot about Reddit and a few surprises. Let’s dig in.

The biggest change is the introduction of Mailbrew

Mailbrew comes in to complement News Explorer as a tool to help me more efficiently consume information that needs my attention. I’m really in love with this service. Please read my Mailbrew review here.

The side effect of the Mailbrew addition is that I’m reconsidering my use of Mailchimp. I’m currently suggesting my newsletter subscribers switch to my new newsletter coming out of Mailbrew, which is much more complete and better looking. It gathers my blog posts from my main blog’s RSS feed and posts coming out of Micro.blog’s RSS feed. I’m closely monitoring the situation. I’ll see how it goes.

My-Blogger-Workflow-2020-05.jpeg

My blogger workflow as of 2020-05

Apple’s News for my content distribution

As I write this third workflow update, I’m still waiting for Apple to approve my feed submission, more than three months after my submission. Some people think Apple no longer allows user-generated content. Too bad. I decided to remove the service altogether from my workflow diagram for now. Who news Apple anyway, right?

What about Reddit

Curiously, I forgot to mention that my blog posts are cross-posted to my subreddit named /numericcitizen. I’m using IFTTT for this. For those who consume their content from Reddit, they can subscribe to my subreddit.

Cross-posting from Micro.blog to WordPress

The thing that I like the most about Micro.blog is its simplicity. It is very easy to post new thoughts, comments, etc. Sometimes, I want to put something out there without all the fuss and requirements of WordPress, like tags, SEO edits, feature images, etc.

But, for some of my posts on Micro.blog, I want them to appear on my main blog too. I recently experimented with a few things with IFTTT and a WordPress plugin to automate this task. But in each case, I didn’t like the results. On top of that, the WordPress plugin that I tried has not received an update in more than two years. There are some bugs with my current version of WordPress, which is 5.4.1. For me, it’s a no-go.

I decided to use a manual process with MarsEdit. This venerable macOS application is simple and can post to WordPress and Micro.blog. The latter is currently being added to an upcoming version. So far, it is working fine for me.

Cross-posting with MarsEdit means copy-pasting my text from one place to another and hitting the “post to blog” button. Simple enough.

A bit like NewsExplorer and Mailbrew, Pager is an application that works for me in the background. The Pager app helps me stay updated with content I care about on Reddit. I should probably write a separate review. The design of this iPadOS application is great. Setting up filters is easy. It’s been a while since the last update; my hope is that this app is still being maintained. It’s a really cool app, and it is free!

An unexpected change of behaviour

As you probably know by now, Apple recently introduced a few new things regarding its iPad product line: iPadOS 13.4 with complete support for mouse and trackpad and the Magic Keyboard. These two simple things are unexpectedly changing my workflow. I happen to work much more often on my iPad than I used to. Second, my usage of Notion diverted my time spent in Ulysses. Notion is not a text processor per se, but it can act as one. I write most of my text in Notion and do the final write-up in Ulysses when I’m done with my research and my ideas are fully written down. Overall, I spend less time in Ulysses, but it’s still an essential application in my workflow.

Final words

I feel my blogger workflow is stabilizing a bit. No major changes are on the horizon, which is a good thing. Now, I’m concentrating on the content.

My Updated Blogger Workflow as of 2020-03

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 13:00:00 -0400

A synthesized view of my blogging workflow as of 2020-03.

Initially published a month ago, my blogger workflow received a lot of traction, and since then, I made a few important changes. Today, I want to address how I consume content and which tools I use to support my research.

My blogger workflow and tools as of 2020-03.

A significant change was made to how I manage and consume RSS feeds. I recently switched from Reeder to News Explorer (read my review of News Explorer) because of the more powerful features available, as I wrote in my review. Because of this change, first, I no longer need to depend on Feedly for my synchronization service. Second, I can more easily keep track of VIP tweeps or YouTube channels.

A fundamental change is integrating Notion.so to help me as a blogger. I no longer rely on Apple’s Reminders for bookmarking internet stuff I want to blog about. And Notion is so much more powerful than Raindrop.io. Expect a review of Notion in the near future.

Flipboard and Tumblr were also added as new publishing conduits for those who prefer these platforms. As of this writing, I’m still waiting for Apple to approve my submission. Rumours are circulating that Apple no longer accepts user-created content for News. If true, I think it is a missed opportunity for Apple.

Two apps that I use a lot made their apparition on the workflow: Linky and Birdbrain. The former is used to generate visual quotes like the following one. The latter helps me manage the Twitter followers or tweets that I follow.

An example of a quote created with Linky

Other improvements to come

I would like to see better support for Apple’s Shortcuts in Notion.so app and Micro.blog. Another thing that I would like to see is the support of Micro.blog in Linky, which currently only supports Twitter. I asked the developer about it, and he said we were often asked about this. My fingers are crossed.

Introducing my Blogger Workflow — 2020-02

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 02:00:00 -0400

If you are a blogger like me, you may find it interesting to learn about what tools other bloggers are using. If you are not (yet) a blogger, you’ll see what it takes to start and thrive! As a long-time blogger, I’m happy to share all the details about my workflow with you. You’ll learn about the tools I like to use and the relation between them. Let’s dig in.

For my blogging needs, I rely on two blogging platforms: WordPress and Micro.blog. They have their own purposes.

My main blog (“Numeric Citizen Blog”) is hosted on WordPress.com. The design is based on the Baskerville 2 WordPress theme¹. As a paying subscriber to the WordPress Business Plan, my readers get an ad-free website.

Recently, I decided to lower the frequency of new posts in order to publish longer ones. For shorter posts, I’m now using exclusively micro.blog (see “The Return of Micro Blogging ?”). I’m quite happy with my choices. WordPress is well known but micro.blog is quite marginal. This platform is simple to use, looks a bit like Twitter but doesn’t have all the noise and there is no advertising. There is a choice of native macOS or iOS clients, too, which is mandatory for me.

As you can see from the workflow diagram below, Twitter is the only social network that I use to reach out to potential readers. Posts from micro.blog and WordPress get cross-posted automatically to Twitter. This is another way of reaching more people, especially with the use of hashtags.

Because of my use of Micro.blog, I rarely publish directly on Twitter these days. I prefer micro.blog for this purpose. With automatic cross-posting to Twitter, I save time and reach both communities with a single post which is nice.

I don’t use Facebook, for well-documented reasons (see “My Final Post On Facebook”). I’m not on Pinterest either, as my blog content doesn’t fit this platform. I used to be on Tumblr a few years ago with many smaller blogs, but I decided to leave this behind (see “Bye Bye Tumblr”). Will I return? It depends. The future of Tumblr is now in the hands of Automattic, the owner of WordPress.com (see “Automattic buys Tumblr from Verizon for reportedly less than $20 million”). I’ll see.

Publishing services

Blogging is cool, but being read is even better! That is why I’m using a few publishing services to reach more people. From time to time, I manually cross-post my most important pieces on Medium. I’m part of the Medium Partner Program, which gets me a few dollars here and there for my content but nothing to pay the bills.

I’m also relying on Google News albeit with fewer expectations to reach out to readers. On top of this, I’m waiting for the approval of Apple’s News service and Flipboard to go live. I don’t expect too much traction from these services, though. I see them as complemental tools to reach audiences where they are. The effort to put them in place is very low, so why not? Think of this as experimental.

Supporting tools

As you may already know, I’m very much invested in the Apple ecosystem. As such, I’m using the Mac, the iPad or the iPhone as a writing or creation tool. To enable this movement between all devices, I rely on multi-platform support for most of my supporting apps. From Ulysses (see “Switching to Ulysses for my Writing Needs”) to Adobe Spark (see “My Review of Adobe Spark Post”), I can use all of these on all my devices. Apple’s iCloud is the syncing service that ties it all up, and it works without an itch².

The journaling app DayOne plays an important role behind the scenes. This is the tool that I use to archive my published content. Very cool stuff. (see “Documenting My Numeric Life”).

A less-known web service called CrowdSignal allows me to create polls and gather feedback for my blog posts. Each blog post can be rated, and the results are accumulated on CrowdSignal. As of this writing, the post’s rating is at 4.5 / 5.0, which is not bad at all! This service, owned by Automattic, is free of charge, which is cool.

WordPress is an open architecture that allows the development of plugins. I use a total of 26 plugins that complement the basic WordPress features. One example is a Buffer plugin, which will put every post on my Buffer queue in order to repost a reminder about content published on my blog to Twitter a few days later. Another plugin is Google Analytics, which provides a dashboard of the visitor’s statistics on my WordPress Admin page, which is very handy. Finally, I’m using a plugin that cross-posts content to Apple’s News Service³.

Quality control

To improve the quality of my posts, I rely on two important tools: Grammarly and Yoast SEO. I pay for these because I think the quality is mandatory. Don’t forget, I’m French-Canadian, so I need help improving my English. Both of these plug-ins are doing a great job. Grammarly is available as a browser plugin, as a standalone application or on the web. I wish I could use it within Ulysses, but plugins are impossible on iOS. Because of that, the final proofing is done on the web, not within Ulysses. Finally.

Yoast is a WordPress plugin and works in the background while editing a new post. It helps me optimize my blog posts for search engines⁴. The following screenshot is Yoast in action while editing this post.

A few words about my blogger routine

Each morning, I spend about 45-60 minutes to work on many things related to being a blogger. It can be reading, searching, designing, testing, writing or publishing. I do spend even more time during the weekends. Overall, five to ten hours per week of hard work. That is a lot, but it is rewarding. This time is on top of what I spend on my other passion: photography.

Miscellaneous notes and room for improvements

Finally, on the workflow diagram, you’ll find all the paying services or applications with a green dollar icon. I spend over $500 annually on this blogging adventure, but I think it is worth it. If you want to encourage me, feel free to give me some tips or become a paying member of my blog⁵. It is less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee. Think about it.

RSS feeds are an important tool in my blogger life. I use them a lot to stay in touch with my sources. But I also enable them on my blogs as I think they facilitate content diffusion and consumption (see “To all content creators: RSS feeds as facilitators, use them!”).

There is one place where I think I’ll change the tools that I use. Look for the yellow box on the diagram. I’m in the process of reconsidering Reeder as my RSS reader and replacing it with something else⁶. I want to get rid of Feedly altogether. Because Google dropped support for Google’s Reader service, I had to migrate to Feedly.

Last words

If you think I could improve something in this workflow, feel free to make any suggestions in the comments section. I would be glad to read from other bloggers.

If you want to know why I do all this, read my “Why This Blog” page. If you have any questions, please use the comments section and don’t be shy about asking! I’ll be more than happy to provide answers.

This is a paid theme. ↩︎
Spark relies on Adobe Cloud for syncing purposes. ↩︎
I’m still waiting for Apple’s review process to complete and accept me as a publisher. ↩︎
This is called SEO: search engine optimization. ↩︎
Look at the bottom of this post to subscribe with as little as five dollars per month. Thank you. 🤗😊 ↩︎
Spoiler: I’m in an advanced state of testing News Explorer. ↩︎

Meta on Numeric Citizen I/O — A Blog About Blogging

Here and There

What Happened in Recent Days - A LOT

Getting Started with Automation

Accelerating Learning with AI

Building and Connecting

The Deeper Challenges

Key Insights

The Bigger Picture

Using AI For Writing is Lazy? Think Again

My Content Creation Ecosystem - Fall 2025 Update

Behind the Scenes of the “On Apple Failures" Writing Project

Eternal Debate for Online Creators

Now on Chillidog Hosting

Getting Ready for Elements CMS

Now on Ghost 6!

My Official Response To Those Sketchy Offers

An Update On My Craft to Micro.blog Migration

I’m an Open Blogger

The Future of Writing? Testing ChatGPT Canvas for a Specific Use Case

Blogging about Blogging — Eight Questions Answered

My Content Creator Workflow & Digital Tools — Edition 2024-12

Until next time

No More Photo Duplicates Hopefully

Some Hurdles to Fix Already

Let's start something new. Again.

My Content Creator Workflow as of 2023-04

Bye Bye WordPress.com

Bye bye Twitter

Changing reading habits

A more focused publication channel

Is my Craft usage fading out?

Some Updates to My Blogging Setup

A Month After Migrating Off Blot.im — Observations

My Content Creator Workflow as of 2022-12

Interesting Fact About My Twitter Usage

Making YouTubes Videos - Observations & Notes

My Blogger Workflow as of 2021-03

Under consideration

Closing remarks

The First Post of a Long Series

Meta?

Why?

My Updated Blogger Workflow as of 2021-01

What’s in?

What’s out?

A mature workflow

My Updated Blogger Workflow as of 2020-11

My Updated Blogger Workflow as of 2020-09

Why Substack?

Cleanup required

My Updated Blogger Workflow as of 2020-08

My Updated Blogger Workflow as of 2020-05

The biggest change is the introduction of Mailbrew

Apple’s News for my content distribution

What about Reddit

Cross-posting from Micro.blog to WordPress

Another tiny but really useful addition: Pager for Reddit

An unexpected change of behaviour

Final words

My Updated Blogger Workflow as of 2020-03

Other improvements to come

Introducing my Blogger Workflow — 2020-02

Two platforms and a social network

Publishing services

Supporting tools

Quality control

A few words about my blogger routine

Miscellaneous notes and room for improvements

Last words