Today, I’m excited to share my latest digital ecosystem update, previously known as “The Numeric Citizen Content Creator Workflow”. The diagram sports a new title: “The Numeric Citizen Digital Ecosystem” to better reflect its scope: to enumerate services and apps at the center of my digital presence. It was entirely rebuilt in Apple Freeform, leaving Apple Keynote behind. Freeform is a joy to use; it’s much more flexible and powerful than Keynote, too. The content was also expanded to include a new set of tools I have built over the last few months since publishing the previous update. Let's dive in for all the details.

The entire ecosystem diagram was rebuilt from the ground up. Full resolution version available here.

At a high level, both Micro.blog and Ghost remain the two hosting and publishing pillars for most of my *.numericcitizen.me websites, while a few other websites, like my Ko-fi page and my new about website, Who Is Numeric Citizen, are hosted elsewhere. On the diagram, my websites are positioned on the left and in the top-left portion.

As you might notice, a lot has happened since my last update. Thanks to Claude AI and Claude Code, I made a major shift toward web app to meet two fundamental needs: a brand new bookmark manager (replacing AnyBox), and a lightweight RSS reader that integrates with my bookmark manager. Together, they support my reading workflow and help me produce the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter. See both web apps in this YouTube video.

My custom-built RSS reader web application

What’s in, what changed since last fall

AI is now playing a more prominent role in my digital ecosystem since the beginning of 2026. It’s mainly used for vibe coding, maintaining my web applications, and content summarization. You’ll see little light bulbs (💡) in the diagram; they indicate where AI summarization is involved. Anthropic’s Claude AI replaced OpenAI’s ChatGPT in all my workflows. Plus, Claude AI and Claude Code enabled many new possibilities for helping me build small digital services and web apps for my personal needs. It’s something I couldn’t have imagined a year ago.

Claude Code’s main window with some of my projects on the left sidebar and the DIFF view shown on the right

Another milestone was to replace IFTTT with n8n automation. It’s a major upgrade in functionality and usability. My n8n instance is running on the Digital Ocean hosting service, inside a pre-packaged “droplet” with 1 GB of RAM and 10 GB of disk space for $6 a month. Digital Ocean provides a one-click install of n8n which really made a difference in selecting Digital Ocean as a hosting service. I created more than a dozen automations, far more complex and useful than what I could build with IFTTT. Claude AI was also involved in optimizing many n8n workflows. It was possible because n8n supports the MCP endpoint that is exposed to Claude AI. In the following table, I present a summary of my n8n automation workflows. As you will see, Discord is a new entry, as it provides a custom server to receive n8n workflow outputs and some status reports from Tinylytics. Also good to know: all my n8n workflows are automatically documented in a Craft document, thanks to Claude Code, which connects to both the n8n and Craft backends. To get a well-structured documentation, I created a Claude Skill.

A portion of an automation workflow shown in the n8n canvas

My automated n8n workflows

Here’s a list of utilities running as n8n workflows on my self-hosted DigitalOcean instance.

• API Credit Health Check — Pre-flight check on Anthropic credits; alerts Discord if depleted
• Today's Forecast — Pulls weather data into the Craft daily note
• Tinylytics Insights — Injects site analytics summary into the Craft daily note
• Apple Daily News — Fetches MacSurfer headlines into the Craft daily note
• Setup Craft Daily Note — Creates the day's 8-section journaling scaffold in Craft
• Anthropic Daily Cost Report — Posts 7-day and 30-day AI spend breakdown to Discord

Example of automatically propulated Craft Daily note, thanks to n8n automation.

RSS & News Aggregation

A few workflows are used for content processing in the context of news consumption and Micro.blog timeline processing.

• RSS Daily Summary — Aggregates RSS feeds and delivers an AI-summarized digest
• Micro.blog Timeline Highlights — Summarizes Micro.blog activity via Claude
• Apple News Flash Alerts — Real-time Apple news alerts from RSS
• Apps & Services Release Highlights — Monitors release notes feeds for notable updates

Content & Publishing

Other workflows for supporting my content creation include:

• Craft → Ghost — Two workflows (specific and generic) push Craft documents to Ghost as drafts
• Ghost Publish Proxy — Triggers final publication on Ghost via webhook
• Craft Fetch Proxy — Fetches Craft document content on demand for downstream processing
• Poke to Craft / Peek at Ghost — Manual/chat-triggered utilities for quick content inspection

Newsletter & Email

A special workflow automation is processing email summarization on demand: simply forwarding an email to a dedicated Gmail account and after a few seconds I’ll receive a summary on my Discord server.

• Email Summarizer — Polls Gmail every minute; summarizes newsletters and posts to Discord

Maintenance

Finally, backing up my workflows is a must, just in case something really bad happens on my n8n instance.

• GitHub Backup — Backs up all n8n workflow definitions to a GitHub repo every Sunday

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The Craft Agents main window

The updated diagram illustrates this: Craft consists of two parts—Craft content stored in the Craft cloud backend and various Craft clients, including the native general-purpose client and Craft Agents. Additionally, Craft now supports MCP and offers a comprehensive set of APIs, emphasizing the division between data storage and client applications. These latest additions to Craft are game changers and enable new use cases.

A few thoughts and observations about Craft Agents, a sort of spin-off of Craft, are worth sharing here. Think about Craft Agents as an orchestrator of AI agents. In many ways, Craft Agents can be compared to the Claude Desktop app. There is a high level of affinity between Craft Agents and Craft, connected via APIs or MCP. Consuming Craft content through Craft Agents is an obvious use case. Yet, I’m still not sure why the team behind Craft is spending so much effort on this, but it’s interesting to follow nonetheless. I’m still looking for clear use cases for it, hence the yellow dot (🟡) on its icon in the diagram. There are a few aspects of the app’s design and structure that I don’t like. I don’t like using the task manager to organize conversations. I don’t think task management belongs in this app. Plus, Craft Agents is a very hungry consumer of AI credits. It’s a major concern unless you subscribe to the highest tier of any AI provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.). It’s worth noting that Craft also offers an assistant working inside Craft itself.

Also added to my digital ecosystem is CleanShot Cloud for hosting publicly shared screenshots or short screen recordings. I use that to share bugs or feedback. CleanShot X is sort of the client to CleanShot Cloud and is the best Mac utility you can get if you tae a lot of screenshots.

One last automation that prevented me from closing my IFTTT account was the process of automatically archiving my publications in DayOne. This process was briefly described in this blog post. Each time I share a blog post or an article, it is saved in DayOne. Micro.blog added a send-to-DayOne feature, which was the last needed nail in the coffin of IFTTT. It was such a relief.

Speaking of Micro.blog, I created a new website for sharing automated blog post digests on a monthly basis. Most of the process is supported by the use of AI summarization. It’s not fully automated but very effective. Each month I send my Micro.blog postss digest to Craft fo later processing using Craft Agents. The process takes less than 15 minutes to complete. I know there is a potential for a fully automated process. It’s on my todo list.

What’s out since the last update

Chillidog Web Hosting is out (the service hosting the Who Is Numeric Citizen website). It was replaced with Realmac Software Elements’ hosting solution. You can read the doc here. The transition was seamless. I prefer integrated solutions, which Realmac is now offering. Plus. Chillidog was purchased last year by Exact Hosting, and the purchase has been reported to degrade customer service.

Last fall, I added the ChatGPT Atlas browser to my ecosystem, but I removed it after switching to Claude AI. OpenAI Atlas was mainly used for summarizing articles, but now I do this within the Claude Desktop app. I still prefer using the ARC Browser, even though it might eventually be discontinued. The new browser, Dia, could take its place, but I’m interested to see how things unfold. Dia appears to require a Pro subscription to enable AI features in the browser. At $20 a month, I’ll pass.

Gone is Google News for cross-posting from Micro.blog. It never took off. Also gone is AnyBox, the very well-done bookmark manager available on all Apple platforms, but not available on the web, like Raindrop.io. I never liked Raindrop.io, so I built my own bookmark manager as a web-only app. It’s one of my new custom-built web apps.

Finally, the numericcitizen.io domain will be retired when it expires later this year, and the content hosted on a dedicated Craft subscription has already been moved to my main Craft subscription, helping me reduce costs. The meta.numericcitizen.me is taking over (my previous content was migrated there during 2025). Some of my content was also simply removed from public access.

My newly redesigned metablog as seen in dark mode

Still pondering about these

You’ll find yellow dots on the diagram which points to services or apps that I’m reconsidering. Let’s review a few of them.

Plausible vs Tinylytics: I use two web analytics. Plausible has been around in my ecosystem since I left Google Analytics. Then came long Tinylytics and I wanted to support its developer plus it provides a great design compared to Plausible. Yet, I have a lot of historic data in the latter. Plus, I started using Tinylytics APIs to feed one of my workflows who inject data inside Craft daily notes and dashboard web application. I could replace this with Plausible’s APIs but I don’t feel it’s worth the effort.

Things 3, a popular and highly regarded task manager, is currently being reconsidered. I like managing my to-dos, but I don’t have many. If I want to eliminate Things 3, I could switch to Craft’s basic task management, but it’s quite limited. For now, my most likely option is to create my own app, much like I did with my RSS reader or bookmark manager. However, I’m not in a hurry to switch away since it doesn’t require a subscription, giving me plenty of time to decide and develop a replacement.

Ulysses is another case where I’m pondering its long-term usefulness. If I can post to Micro.blog or Ghost directly from Craft (using my custom-made n8n workflows), why should I continue paying for this app? The next renewal is a year from now.

Finally, my Flipboard account hosts a magazine that pulls content from my main website via its RSS feed. I have 8 followers, apparently. I never get any reactions or comments from this place. The bigger question: is Flipboard still a thing these days?

Risk management

In this edition of the diagram, I included red dots (🔴) to indicate potential disruption risks. For example, Anthropic recently adjusted Claude's credit consumption, leading to a fivefold increase in the number of credits needed to perform the same task; something I've noticed too. Additionally, Anthropic conducted an experiment in which new subscribers could access Claude Code only if they chose the Max subscription tier at $200 per month. Although they quickly reversed this change, it raises the concern that they might eliminate the $20 plan altogether. If that happened, I could face serious difficulties and might stop maintaining my web applications built with Claude Code. Vercel is another risk potential: I’m using the free tier, which is rather generous. If they decided to remove this free tier, I would have to reconsider my position: either drop my web application or accept paying the monthly price they charge.

Concluding thoughts

This evolution reflects a fundamental shift in how I approach my digital life. By embracing AI assistants like Claude and building custom tools tailored to my specific needs, I've moved away from cobbling together disparate services toward a more cohesive, intentional ecosystem. The transition from automation platforms like IFTTT to n8n, coupled with the ability to code solutions with Claude Code, has given me both flexibility and control—rare commodities in the world of Software-as-a-Service.

The introduction of AI summarization across my workflows has transformed how I consume information, while the consolidation of my web presence under fewer, better-managed domains simplifies my digital footprint. Yet this ecosystem remains dynamic and somewhat fragile, dependent on the sustained availability of key services and the pricing decisions of AI providers. The risk management considerations I've outlined aren't just technical footnotes—they're essential guideposts for maintaining digital independence in an increasingly interconnected world.

As I continue to iterate and refine this ecosystem, the principles remain constant: intentionality, control, and the ability to evolve. The next edition will likely bring even more changes, but I'm optimistic that the foundations I've built will prove resilient enough to adapt to whatever comes next.

Previous update to my digital ecosystem can be found here.

Recent readings about n8n and with the help of Claude AI, I finally found a way to replace IFTTT for archiving my RSS feeds content: it won’t be by using an n8n automation but a simple feature that was sitting right in front of my eyes on Micro.blog: cross-posting. The trick is simple: each of my RSS feed is added to the Sources panel in Micro.blog, from there, I configure cross-post the RSS feed article to other places like Day One journal using email-to-dayone. Voilà. I’ll be closing my IFTTT account later today after so many years of service. The only rather big downside: Micro.blog doesn’t copy images from the source into Day One while IFTTT could. 🫤

Update #1: I submitted my issue on the Micro.blog help forum, and a few hours later, a fix was on the way. Thanks @manton

Update #2: And now it is available; photos are now supported, too! Thanks to Manton!

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.

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.

I’m trying out the new generative AI-based analytics from Tinylytics, and I’m very impressed. Here’s an example for my main website. To my knowledge, that’s a first for website analytics and I hope that Plausible will take a look at this because it’s really useful. Plus, Tinylytics allows you to create your own prompt and see a different take than the one generated by default.

Some cleanup: Readwise is gone. Supporting services are now grouped at the bottom. Corrected a few typos. I made some visual adjustments to make things a little bit cleaner and easier to visualize, especially for website miniatures. I renamed the diagram to reflect the notion of an ecosystem instead of a workflow.

Many additions: each enhanced service with generative AI features is marked as such with a little brain icon. That’s the case for Inoreader, Craft and Grammarly. All my Micro.blog-hosted websites are now indicated. Since adhering to POSSE principles, I added the Fediverse and Bluesky icons and drew the cross-posting arrow lines to them.

A high-resolution version of this diagram is available here.

What is POSSE

The POSSE principle stands for “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.” It is a content distribution strategy often recommended for writers, bloggers, and publishers. The primary idea is to first publish your content on a platform you control, such as your personal website or blog, and then syndicate or share that content on other platforms like social media, Medium, or different online communities.

Here are some key points about the POSSE principle:

1. Ownership and Control: By publishing on your own site first, you maintain control over your content and ensure it exists in a space you own. This helps protect your work from the risks of platform changes or shutdowns.
2. Centralized Content: Your website becomes the central hub where all your content is stored and can be accessed by your audience.
3. Traffic and SEO: By driving traffic to your own site, you can improve your website’s SEO, increase your audience, and potentially monetize traffic through ads, affiliate links, or direct sales.
4. Syndication: After publishing on your own site, you can share your content with a wider audience by syndicating it to other platforms. This strategy helps reach readers who might not visit your site directly.
5. Preservation: Content publishing on third-party platforms may be subject to their rules and policies. Publishing first on your own site ensures your content is preserved and remains unchanged regardless of policy changes elsewhere.

The POSSE principle is popular among creators who value long-term control over their work and want to build a sustainable and direct relationship with their audience.

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.