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

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!

From My RSS Feeds To Day One

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 08:26:53 -0400

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!

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.

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.

Generative AI Applied to Website Analytics - Cool

Mon, 26 May 2025 06:45:24 -0400

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.

A Mandatory Update to my Content Creation Ecosystem

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 13:38:46 -0400

A visual look at my content creator ecosystem.

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:

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.
Centralized Content: Your website becomes the central hub where all your content is stored and can be accessed by your audience.
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.
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.
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.

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, 02 Sep 2024 08:15:52 -0400

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

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.

Why So Many Publishing Platforms?

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 21:40:56 -0400

For long-time readers and followers, they know that I own a few websites or publishing places, but a reminder is always welcomed. With so many places to publish to, you might wonder why not use only one big website. Well, I’m glad you asked. You’ll find most of the answers in the following diagram.

My (too) many publishing platforms

As you can see, each place fills a different role. Think of them as publishing channels. I prefer to have many focused places with content directed to a specific crowd over having a single channel full of seemingly unrelated posts. But there is more to it: I love using different tools and services. Each has its strengths and weaknesses and a specific set of features. That’s what drives me the most to use different publishing platforms.

Browsing Past Published Articles on Ghost

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 18:30:30 -0400

Circumventing Ghost’s limited posts management capabilities.

List of publications in Ghost admin panel.

I recently decided to spend some time editing past articles published on my Numeric Citizen Space website. I first thought that by going to my Ghost admin page, I could quickly browse past published articles by month. I couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, Ghost offers limited post management capabilities, thanks to its limited content browsing capabilities. I cannot go back, say, list articles published early in 2023. I can sort by ascending or descending order, but from there, I have to scroll through a long, dynamically created list of posts. It’s not very effective for a website with 600-plus posts. I had to find a different option to locate a post for an update. This is where Ghost’s content APIs come into play.

The following API request doesn’t do the job (API key voluntarily removed!):

curl -H "Accept-Version: v5.0" "https://numeric-citizen-introspection.ghost.io/ghost/api/content/posts/?key={APIkeygoeshere}&fields=title,url,published_at,updated_at&filter=published_at:>2024-01-01%2Bpublished_at:<2024-02-01" | json_pp

Let me explain what is this API request.

First, I’m going to the request using the macOS command line, hence the curl command. Next, the whole query follows in quotes. I query the content/posts API endpoint. Next, I pass my API key, followed by a field selection (&fields), and next with the filter using the published date between two dates. Finally, I pipe the results in the pretty JSON print macro (is this a macro?) so the output looks like this:

jfm@CraftingMAChine ~ % curl -H "Accept-Version: v5.0" "https://numeric-citizen-introspection.ghost.io/ghost/api/content/posts/?key={API-key-goes-here}&fields=title,id,url,published_at,updated_at&filter=published_at:>2024-01-01%2Bpublished_at:<2024-02-01" | json_pp
	{
	   "meta" : {
	      "pagination" : {
	         "limit" : 15,
	         "next" : null,
	         "page" : 1,
	         "pages" : 1,
	         "prev" : null,
	         "total" : 9
	      }
	   },
	   "posts" : [
	      {
	         "id" : "65b6a09840566000015b0d37",
	         "published_at" : "2024-01-28T13:50:19.000-05:00",
	         "title" : "My Weekly Creative Summary for the Week of 2024/03",
	         "updated_at" : "2024-01-28T13:50:19.000-05:00",
	         "url" : "https://numericcitizen.me/my-weekly-creative-summary-for-the-week-of-2024-03/"
	      },
	      {
	         "id" : "65b6540640566000015b0cf7",
	         "published_at" : "2024-01-28T08:23:26.000-05:00",
	         "title" : "Special Message to Paying Subscribers",
	         "updated_at" : "2024-01-28T08:23:26.000-05:00",
	         "url" : "https://numericcitizen.me/special-message-to-paying-subscribers/"
	      },
	      {
	         "id" : "65b16e25bc7fde0001314ccb",
	         "published_at" : "2024-01-24T15:09:24.000-05:00",
	         "title" : "The Mac Turns 40",
	         "updated_at" : "2024-01-24T15:09:24.000-05:00",
	         "url" : "https://numericcitizen.me/the-mac-turns-40/"
	      },
	      {
	         "id" : "65ad35418532ae000169ddd2",
	         "published_at" : "2024-01-21T10:22:33.000-05:00",
	         "title" : "My Weekly Creative Summary for the Week 2024/02",
	         "updated_at" : "2024-01-21T10:22:33.000-05:00",
	         "url" : "https://numericcitizen.me/my-weekly-creative-summary-for-the-week-2024-02/"
	      },
	   ]
	}

Next, I copy the post ID of one article and paste it my browser for edition using this special URL:

https://numeric-citizen-introspection.ghost.io/ghost/#/editor/post/652e6eedb8a2650001ad9c5b

This URL brings me directly into the Ghost editor, provided that i was already authenticated with my account. That’s pretty much it. It could be much simpler. For this, I miss WordPress.

You can find the Ghost API document right here.

My Content Creator Workflow as of 2023-11

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 07:00:00 -0400

My-Creative-Workflow-2023-11.png

My creative workflow as of 2023-11. You can download an higher resolution here.

This 2023-11 version has a few changes and a cleaner and more focused workflow. Before going into specific details, I wanted to remind readers that I support the " POSSE " idea. You can read one post about it here. This workflow presented reflects this. As a reminder, here is one definition of the POSSE principle according to ChatGPT:

“POSSE” is an acronym that stands for “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.” It’s a content publishing model that first encourages publishing content on your own website, and then syndicating (or sharing) that content on other platforms or websites. This approach is often recommended in digital marketing and personal branding strategies, as it allows individuals to maintain control over their original content while still benefiting from the audience and engagement found on larger, established platforms. The POSSE model is particularly relevant in the context of blogging, social media, and online content creation.

Welcome AI, welcome ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney

AI is making an official entry in my creative workflow. I wrote a long piece stating my guidelines for using AI in my creative work. You should read those and maybe get some inspiration out of them. The header image of this article was generated using Dall-E.

Dropshare coupled with Short.io enables me to share files like screenshots or other things. The setup was documented in detail in a previous article on this meta blog. Behind the scene, Dropshare is configured to use Backblaze to store files in a S3 bucket.

Bye bye to my Digital Garden

I came to the conclusion that a digital garden isn’t something for me. I decided to move some portions into my official about page. You can still access the remains of the garden, here.

A fun experience with Tinylytics

I’ve been using Plausible for my analytics needs but a cool guy (the same who’s also working with Manton Reece on Micro.blog hosting service, developed a lightweight version which I decided to support.

Safari-Personal (Default) — Sites tinylytics@2023-11-23@20.13.49@2x.png

The Tinylytics dashboard

Google Sheets is out too

I was using Google Sheets to save links to every post on Micro.blog via an IFTTT automation. I no longer feel the need to key this in place.

Brief

Brief is now part of my workflow because they also took over Mailbrew, both are forming a powerful content consumption enabler duo. Some of my Mailbrew newsletters contain Brief as a source for news, which is heavily using AI for summarization.

Why It’s So Hard to Make Up My Mind About Digital Tools?

Sun, 07 May 2023 10:00:00 -0400

This article posted back in 2022, was a glimpse at a great moment of confusion. Following the publication of “Things That Don’t Stick With Me”, the next logical thing to do now is to talk about my seemingly permanent state of confusion with my choices of many digital tools.

In short, the problem is that, in many cases, I use different apps to do the same thing. The worst case to come to my mind is RSS feeds readers. After many years with News Explorer, I tried NetNewsWire, Reeder and Inoreader. Oh, I forgot about ReadKit too. The light at the end of the tunnel is in sight because News Explorer is now out. After discovering and experimenting with Inoreader, I concluded that News Explorer no longer fit my needs. One of them being the text-highlighting capability. That is one less app to use or consider. NetNewsWire simplicity makes the app attractive. Reeder’s design is also attractive. I do use Inoreader with Inoreader web service. I’m not decided yet on the next steps: which one should I keep?

Twitter vs Tweetbot was another example. When I was on Twitter, I constantly switched between those two. The funny thing is that for those still on Twitter, third-party apps for Twitter are all dead. This would have fixed my issue! Now, with Mastodon, it’s worst because of the plethora of available apps. There are too many to list here and the list keeps expanding. Thankfully, I don’t use Mastodon much, but if I did, well, you know the drill by now, right?

On Micro.blog, same issue. I’m constantly moving between the original Micro.blog app and Gluon. Both are great but latter is a bit more complete.

Box and Dropbox used to be examples of my indecision before I went all in with iCloud Drive a few years ago. I still use Google’s Drive for storing Google’s Sheets updated via an IFTTT automation. That, I’m no longer sure about its usefulness.

Clipboard managers were another source of conflicting views. There were three apps in that space: Copied, Pastebot and Unclutter. I’ve settled on the latter because it is so much more than a clipboard manager. Yet, it took me way too long before deciding which one to keep. I don’t use a clipboard manager on the iPhone anymore.

Unclutter window on my Mac — Three Areas: the clipboard history, content of a folder and content of a specific text file.

Here’s another one: Apple’s Notes, Notion or Craft. I use Craft 95% of the time, Notes 4% of the time, and Notion 1% for the rest. Oh, I forgot to mention Tot, a nifty tech editor! What is preventing me from settling on Craft for everything? I use Notion for storing information about a sideline project because Craft is not as good for that type of information.
For my photo processing and retouching needs: Acorn 7, Pixelmator Pro, Photomator, Adobe Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic are installed somewhere on my devices. I should probably drop Adobe Suite, but It would be a mess to retrieve all my photos backed up to the Adobe Cloud. I’m being lazy here. I’m really enjoying Photomator on my iPad and iPhone. This application is better designed than Apple’s Photos for photo editing. Photomator is coming soon to the Mac, too, apparently, to make matters worst, I guess. I’m on the waiting list for a TestFlight invite.
As a computer performance enthusiast, I use utilities like Sensei, iStats Menu, iStatistica Pro, and the open-source project “Stats” available on GitHub. I use iStats Menu on my Mac mini, Stats on my Mac Pro (used for my SDDCbox project) and iStatistica Pro on my MacBook Air. Sensei should probably be dropped.

Image.png

Reddit, Apollo, Slide and Comet. There are all Reddit clients. They all offer nice and different things when consuming or interacting with Reddit content. For example, Slide comes with the best widgets, but is lacking active development and isn’t the best at browsing content. Comet isn’t been updated in two years. Apollo runs on Apple Silicon Macs but suffers from some display bugs.
Password Managers, another story of indecision and laziness: 1Password and Apple’s Password Keychain. I should move from 1Password to Apple’s solution once and for all. Maybe if Apple had a discreet password manager? I’m undecided.
Tasks managers represent another case of spreading myself all over the place. For personal to-dos, I depend on Apple’s Reminders. For my creative workflow, I depend on Things 3 but there was a time last year when I tried using Craft as a to-do manager. It didn’t go well, and I decided to bring back Things 3 in my workflow. I documented my change of heart in this video. One comforting thought, I know that I’m not alone in my quest for the best tools. This documented case with Things 3 and OmniFocus is a good example.

There is hope

I might sound like a tormented person, but I’m not. I would say that I’m not as focused as I should be. But there is hope because I do make decisions from time to time when things become clear or obvious. Let’s see a few examples.

On the publishing platforms front, things are improving. Thankfully, this year, I’m focusing. There use to be WordPress, Micro.blog, Substack, Ghost, Blot and Write.as. WordPress is out. Substack is out. Blot is out. I’m down to two publishing platforms: Ghost and Micro.blog. That’s it. Sure, i cross-post some content to Mastodon, Bluesky and Flipboard. But that doesn’t count.
On the photography side, at some point, there was 500px, Smugmug, Unsplash, Glass, Exposure. 500px is out. I decided to move out of Smugmug by the end of my subscription (next year), so that I can focus on Glass and Exposure.

Image.png

I recently dropped Pocket, Matter and Readwise Reader. So, you see, there is hope!
For bookmarking, at some point, I was using Apple’s Safari Reading List, Pocket, Craft bookmarks, Apple’s Quick Notes, and Mailbrew saved items. I dropped all of these in the last year to focus on Anybox. I couldn’t be happier. Oh, I sometimes use Micro.blog bookmarking feature to archive articles than I can highlight then create a linkpost using these highlights.
Ever since I got my M1-based Mac mini, I bought a M1 MacBook Air. I constantly use both of them. One thing that I like to do is to use on app on one Mac and another competitive app on the other Mac. For example, on my MacBook Air, I use “Stats” and on my Mac mini, I use iStats Menu.
iPad Pro vs MacBook Air: because reasons. I love both but in different usage scenarios. I’m fortunate enough to have both.
My reading workflow was in a state of flux: https://numericcitizen.micro.blog/2022/05/07/my-reading-workflow.html. But, thanks to my decisions to drop traditional read-later services like Matter or Pocket, I’m more focused now in that area.

I should probably update this article occasionally because my digital toolkit is constantly evolving. You probably should keep an eye on my documented toolset that I keep up to date.

This article was previously published on Numeric Citizen Space:

Why It’s So Hard to Make Up My Mind About Digital Tools?

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.

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The Write.freely Ecosystem Explained

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 07:00:00 -0400

The time has come for the return of a more open web. I’m embracing this movement by joining platforms or services that are built on open standards and promoting the open web in general as a byproduct.

Write.as is an instantiation version of the WriteFreely writing platform, available as an open-source project. Think of WriteFreely as the open-source version of WordPress. Anyone can get the source and install their own instance.

In May 2022, I took advantage of five-year special pricing to subscribe to the Write.as platform. Without exactly knowing what would be my use case for it, I decided to support the platform, just like I’ve been supporting Micro.blog since 2018. After a while, I discovered the many facets of this writing ecosystem and found it to be a bit confusing. In this article, I explain all the parts of the open and dedicated blogging platform.

First, let’s see what ChatGPT says about Write.as.

Aaron Taylor is the founder & CEO of Cosmic.org and a team of remote employees who work on the Write.as and Remark.as platforms. He is passionate about creating secure, anonymous spaces where people can express themselves without judgement or censorship. He has worked to create tools and features that make anonymous publishing easier and more secure for users. He is also the creator of the Remark.as platform, which gives users more control over how and when they share their thoughts.

Write.as is a project of a small team led by the founder & CEO, Aaron Taylor, at Cosmic.org. They are a remote team based all over the world, from Portland to Berlin to Mexico City.

Write.as is a platform designed to help people express themselves freely and anonymously. It provides a space for everyone to post their thoughts without worry of judgement or censorship. All posts are public and open to comments, however, the identities of the posters can remain anonymous. The project offers a suite of applications and services to make anonymous publishing easier, more secure, and more secure for users. It also provides a way for people to follow topics, publications, or users, engaging in thoughtful dialogue and idea exchange.

Remark.as is a project that is a part of the Write.as platform. It is designed to help users to have conversations with each other in an anonymous, secure, and censorship-free environment. Remark.as has features like tagging topics and publications, creating polls, and engaging in private forums. It also gives users more control over how and when they share their thoughts. Remark.as also provides users with the ability to create polls, surveys, and other interactive features to encourage public participation.

All in all, Write.as and Remark.as are projects by Aaron Taylor and the team at Cosmic.org that provide users with an anonymous, censorship-free space in which to express themselves freely and engage with others. They are both designed to make anonymous publishing easier, more secure, and to give users more control over how and when they share their thoughts.

Write.as is a simple, privacy-focused writing platform. It allows users to create and publish anonymous blog posts, journal entries, and other types of writing without the need for an account or personal information. The platform also includes a built-in editor and the ability to customize the appearance of your writing with different fonts and themes. Additionally, Write.as supports markdown formatting and has a feature called “focuses” which allows users to group related posts together. The platform is designed for those who value privacy and simplicity.

More seriously, here’s a brief description of each component, starting with an overview.

An Overview of the WriteFreely Ecosystem

The following diagram shows all the parts making up the Write.as service, which is part of the WriteFreely ecosystem.

write.as platform.png

The Write.as service is where all the writing experience happens. Since this article isn’t a review, suffices it to say the editor offers a minimalistic and distraction-free environment. Write.as supports adding tags to any blog posts. Cross-posting content in Write.as is available for other platforms like Tumblr, Ghost and Twitter. I connected my account to Ghost but rarely cross-post over there. It’s nice to have, though.
The writer can attach photos at the end of each post by dragging them on the bottom bar. Photos attachments go to the “snap.as” minimalistic photo sharing add-on, tied to Write.as. All photo attachments are shown in one place, on snap.as. Photo galleries are available, albeit with a one-time fee of 10$. Some features are marked as coming soon, but I suspect they are long in coming. I’m unsure if I would invest in this as I prefer dedicated services like Glass.
Submit.as is another add-on to Write.as. As the name suggests, it is a way for an author to accept submissions from other writers. No registration is required from the submitter, helping a frictionless experience. This service is not cheap and comes with a 12$ per month minimal fee. It’s not cheap and I don’t know why. Again, integration with other platforms is marked as coming.
Remark.as is yet another add-on closely tied to Write.as and offers to comment to any of the writer’s blog posts. Commenting is enabled on a per-post basis by adding a special <—discuss—> line anywhere within the post.
Read.write.as is like a content feed coming from other writers. Content published on Write.as gets published on this feed. It comes from the hosted version of Write.as. According to this website, content is cross-posted to an RSS feed, Mastodon and Twitter, but I fear this has been abandoned as the content is somewhat old.
The Mail add-on is where you’ll receive comments from other writers. Those comments are grouped in one place and are public.
Café is a place for discussion, but frankly, I don’t know how posts get promoted there. Those discussions are conversations happening on the Read.write.as section.
Other add-ons like a post signature is available for a monthly 10$ addition (ouch) and eBooks export is also available for another monthly 10$ (ouch).

Still with me? I know, it’s not simple. Write.as certainly feels like a bunch of add-ons taped together.

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Some remarks about the whole thing

The Write.as experience is minimalistic and needs some polishing. I didn’t see improvements since I’m subscribing to the platform. This annoys me.
Overall, the Write.as ecosystem feels minimalistic and unfinished. I don’t expect many improvements to come to the platform. Yet, Matt, the founder of Write.as, is active on discuss.write.as discussion forum, so it’s a good sign.
There’s a Mac app for the Write.freely ecosystem, which should support Write.as but it has been in beta for more than a year. iOS and iPadOS are also available. All apps are available here. I didn’t test these, preferring the web experience.
All these services are part of a suite called the Musing Studio. It’s more of a branding thing. The site hasn’t been updated for a while.

With this article, I hope I shed some light on this open-source project dedicated to writers and bloggers. Overall, I like Write.as, even with some rough edges or unfinished integration. If I failed to explain something correctly, let me know in the comments!

This article has been published on https://write.as/numericcitizen/ (here).

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.

A Peek At My Photo Processing Workflow

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0400

This meta blog is mostly about my content creation workflows. Photography is a big part of it, so I posted an update last week-end about it, after a two-year period.

My last photo processing update is more than two years old. Quite a few things have happened since 2020: many things are in, but many things are out too. I learned to use new services while dropping those that don’t fit my content creation journey. Let’s see what’s in and what’s out.

What’s in

Glass, the new kid on the block of photo-sharing services, is in, and I like it a lot, as I wrote in “my experience with the service.”
Exposure is in, and I love it so much that it will replace Smugmug as my official home. The main reason is the possibility of a great mix of images and text forming beautiful posts. All posts published on Exposure are cross-posted to Micro.blog.
Adobe Spark was renamed to Adobe Express recently. I’m rarely using it, but when I do, I like this creative tool.
On the hardware side, my iPhone 11 Pro was upgraded to an iPhone 13 Pro back in the fall of 2021, and I wrote in detail in Upgrading From the iPhone 11 Pro to iPhone 13 Pro — the Love Story Continues – Numeric Citizen Blog. In summary, it was a great upgrade for my photography creativity.

What’s out

I guess the following items should be added to my long list of “Things that don’t stick with me” article. Let’s see one by one the ousted service or app.

My iPhone 13 Pro played a major role during my trip to Italy last summer. Two-thirds of my shots came through my iPhone 13 Pro device, one third with my Nikon D750. The trend is worrisome. Is my Nikon D750 on the way out? Not yet, but… I know it won’t be part of my next trip to South America this coming December.
500px is out (it previously replaced Flickr) and eventually was, in turn, replaced by Smugmug. The latter is on the way out too, and will be replaced by Exposure. The process has already started (read my Experience using the service recently published).
Universe was a one-year experience but was later abandoned. It gave me the unique experience of building a simple website showing my urban exploration photographic work.
Gurushots, a photo contest community, is out of my digital life. I still have an account but I no longer spend time on this website. It’s a big waste of time as fully documented GuruShots Tips and Tricks Guide — The 2021 Edition — Part I – Numeric Citizen Blog and in GuruShots Tips and Tricks Guide — The 2021 Edition — Part 2 – Numeric Citizen Blog.
Camera+ is another victim of my workflow constant optimization. It was briefly replaced by the excellent Halide, but again it was dropped in favour of Apple’s stock Camera app. If I had an iPhone 14 Pro, I would probably switch back to Halide as it offers an easy way to turn on and off the 48-megapixels camera mode.
Also out is my content on Adobe Portfolio (I wrote a small review about the service a while back). While the tied integration with Adobe Lightroom is nice, it wasn’t easy to create a website to my liking, and I eventually dropped the service. Exposure is a photo-sharing service that goes way beyond Adobe Portfolio.
My use of Adobe Lightroom Classic has significantly decreased since my last workflow update. My go-to photo editing app is Adobe Lightroom (both on iPad or M1 MacBook Air), and Pixelmator Photo on the iPad comes in second. The latter was extensively used during my summer trip to Italy.
I also stopped using Skylum Aurora HDR & Luminar as my need for HDR is nonexistent (it used to be the case when I was doing urban exploration, which is no longer the case, sadly).
On the hardware side, I sold my 2017 4K Retina iMac (read “Remembering My Story of Owning The 4K Retina 21.5 inches iMac — 2017-2021 – Numeric Citizen Blog”) and bought an M1 Mac mini shortly after it came out on the market. I wrote a must-read article on how to migrate Adobe Lightroom Classic from one Mac to another. A few months later, I got an M1 MacBook Air. Both of these machines are simply incredibly mighty.

Miscellaneous

I’m still using Unsplash for selecting photos for addition to my content when it makes sense. I contribute from time to time, and that ok. I’m not investing much time in selecting photo content for publication on Unsplash. Sometimes, less is more.

I used to have an Instagram account (The Perfect Imperfctions) and mostly stopped posting on it. Time is a finite resource, and I have to make choices on where I spend my time creating new and meaningful content. One thing is for sure, Instagram is not what it used to be for photography lovers like me.

Concluding words

My photography workflow is constantly changing but maybe not as often as my blogger workflow. It has been more than two years since my last workflow update, and a lot has changed in two years. I don’t see major changes in the future, as I’d like to keep things a bit more stable for now and use my creativity to make good use of my toolset.

Saving Plausible Analytics for Blot.im

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 14:00:00 -0400

The following screenshot was taken from the Plausible Analytics dashboard. It displays the analytics for Numeric Citizen I/O before being shut down for good. Plausible Analytics isn’t supported on Craft website, but since I’m a Craft Business Plan subscriber, I got some analytics. I’ll be able to compare overtime if Craft website is correctly reachable from Google.

This Blog Is Transitioning to Craft-Based Hosting Soon

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0400

In the coming days, this blog will be transitioning to a Craft-based hosting solution. As you probably already know, I’m a big fan of Craft (see my YouTube videos here), and a proof-of-concept was running (see: https://world.numericcitizen.io/meta) for a while, and I’m happy with the results. It’s time to move forward.

Why This Change

As a cost-cutting measure and workflow simplification desire, I’ll cancel my subscription to Blot.im and fully focus on Craft as the hosting solution. Craft, when used with the Business Plan subscription tier, proves to be an effective solution for hosting simple websites like this one.

The consequence of this move is that I’ll no longer rely on GIT and Nova (a great GIT client on macOS) to to my publishing. While I learned a few things related to GIT with Blot.im, I need to move forward with a less time-consuming solution.

What You Need To Know

The way Craft hosting is working, I’ll have to make some changes for the domain name to points to the right place. The actual website under Craft is already hosted behind the following URL: https://world.numericcitizen.io/meta. Links like https://numericcitizen.io should be pointing to the new destination URL. I added a domain forwarding rule in GoDaddy DNS so this should happen automatically.

Please note that, unfortunately, Craft website doesn’t support RSS feeds. So, consider removing your RSS feed subscription from your RSS reader app. I don’t have a way to know how many readers are coming here through the RSS feed. This is sad, and I hope not too many readers will be impacted by this change. Please keep coming and visit my website for new and updated content.

I’m also happy to report that Google well indexes Numeric Citizen I/O under Craft at the time of this writing. You’ll always be able to find this blog. Also, recent content will be marked as such using Craft “Focus” box option coupled with a 🆕 emoji.

Looking Forward

Since publishing content in Craft is super easy and frictionless, expect more updates in the future. The goals of this website stay the same: to share my experience with my content creator tools and services. I hope that you learn something new when you visit my website.

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.

I’m Ready to Move This Website to Craft

Wed, 25 May 2022 08:30:00 -0400

Numeric Citizen I/O hosted within Craft document.

In recent days, I’ve been working on a proof-of-concept to replicate Numeric Citizen I/O website currently hosted on Blot.im into Craft. I’m happy to report that the main portion of my work is completed. You can have a look at the end results here (Craft link). Now, the only missing part is the support of custom domains and notifications. The former will help mask the Craft URL behind a more user-friendly URL. The latter will let me know when someone is dropping a comment on the website. For the time being, I’ll update both versions in parallel. Enjoy.

On Migrating WordPress Content to Ghost

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0400

Moving content from one platform to another isn’t easy. And it shouldn’t be that way.

The problem: I want to migrate a few dozens of posts from my Numeric Citizen Blog to my other website, Numeric Citizen Introspection, hosted on Ghost. Easy, right? Think again. The Ghost migrator plugin doesn’t support posts selection; it’s an all or nothing tool. How can I migrate a subset of my posts in that context? By assigning a specific category to each post, I can use the WordPress export tool to export these posts. Next, those posts can then be imported into an empty WordPress instance. From there, I could use the Ghost Migrator plugin. The issue is that I don’t have an empty WordPress instance sitting idle. Using WordPress.com, I cannot install the plugin in a free instance (it’s part of a Business plan, which I subscribe to for my main blog). The solution, was to use my Synology NAS to install an empty WordPress instance locally and proceed from there. Let’s see what the workflow looks like.

1. Turn off post update in the WP to Buffer Pro plugin to prevent flooding your Buffer queue
2. On the source WordPress instance, update posts category that you want to export
3. Install the “Export media with selected content” plugin (which is needed to export images as well as text content)
4. Export content to an XML file with the plugin
5. Install WordPress on Synology NAS with all required dependancies
6. Configure a WordPress website that will be used to host exported content in transit to Ghost
7. Install “Export media with selected content” in Synology WordPress instance (not really required)
8. Install the Ghost Migrator plugin
9. Delete the default post and unneeded page from the WordPress instance, as well as any images from the media library.
10. For each post to export, add the export category of your choice (in my case it was “PhotoLegend”.)
11. Export posts using these options from the WordPress Tools menu

WordPress export with selected content plugin in action.

12. Switch to the WordPress instance running on the Synology NAS
13. Select Import from the Tools menu
14. Select the XML file created from the Export step earlier
15. Set the author for the imported posts

WordPress import plugin in action.

16. Set the Download and import file attachments to bring in images
17. Click Submit and wait for the process to complete (it takes some time, depending on the number of posts and images to import)
18. Verify if all posts are listed in the Posts section (check creation date, author, etc.)
19. Check for Media Library to verify if images are imported
20. Open a few posts to see if content is correctly formatted
21. Edit posts with back links or other elements that need to be updated before importing content into Ghost
22. Edit tags according to the destination website requirements
23. Edit post slug and post title according to destination website requirements
24. Export using Ghost Migrator plugin, select the JSON format since ZipArchive module isn’t installed with this version of WordPress and PHP

Ghost Migrator plugin is pretty limited in functionality.

25. Import JSON file created in the previous step
26. Check for imported posts issues. This is where I hit the wall. Missing photos, content imported as HTML blocs, etc. Not great at all.

Images are missing in imported post.

Posts from WordPress are imported in HTML block in Ghost which is not good.

27. Turn back on the WP to Buffer Pro Post Update option

This workflow doesn’t meet the goal of migrating WordPress content to Ghost. I ended up deleting the posts on the source WordPress instance and kept a copy of them on my Synology instead. I don’t know what I’ll do eventually with these “archived” posts.

Observations

Some observations are in order. This whole story brought many observations that I think you should consider if you’re attempting something similar.

The Ghost Migrator plugin is very limited, which make it hard to build an optimal migration workflow.
Images migration is close to impossible or very unreliable, forcing to use a manual export and import process.
Image optimization plugins on WordPress could make the migration harder than necessary.
Website optimization plugins on WordPress could add tags that are probably hindering the migration process.
Ghost import feature is still a work in progress can there is no way to select which post to import after reading the JSON file.
Testing the migration with a single post would most likely help identify issues faster, instead of importing all the content on the first try.
It doesn’t help to convert the WordPress post to use the block editor before exporting the content.
Migration efforts are time-consuming, making sure the content still has value to your reader is a good idea. I ended up deleting my 23 posts after spending hours of migration efforts. The positive side of this story is that I learned quite a lot.
Even if I couldn’t use the ZIP file for the Ghost Migrator plugin, I don’t think it would have made a difference in the migration quality. I tried to add ZIP Archive to the PHP installation, but the WordPress installation within my Synology NAS is hard to customize. After spending a few hours trying, I dropped the ball.
Data portability is really an issue these days. Even with export or import plugins exist, there are other problems that are inherent to each platform or CMS.

One thing that I gained from this experience is that by using WordPress on my Synology NAS, I can export content from my online WordPress to my Synology NAS for archiving purposes. That’s cool. Other than that, the problem of data mobility across content platform is real.

My Blogger Workflow as of 2021-12

Sat, 18 Dec 2021 17:00:00 -0400

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

My blogger workflow as of 2021-12.

What’s in

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

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

Sharing a Readwise highlight.

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

Typefully analytics.

What’s out

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

In progress

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

Things to improve

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

Miscellaneous

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

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

Moving From Substack to Ghost — My Experience

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Digital nomads. The flavour of the day. Looking for a better digital experience? Every reason is good to move from one place to another in the digital world. It’s about having some fun.

I recently came across this blog post from Greg Morris where he writes: “I look at blog designs like Birchtree.me* and think to myself “I want a blog like that” and then go out and try to build one.”*. I often tell myself the exact same thing. But then, not long after, I came across another blog post , but this time by Andy Nicolaides writing on his blog, The Dent:

“I’ve just gone through yet another blog migration, moving from Micro.Blog to Ghost (again). I was happily posting to Ghost a year or so ago, saw a nice looking blog on Micro.blog and jumped ship. I then sat there, not posting for half a year, before I saw Greg Morris’ updated site over on Ghost and my blog envy kicked off again. Let’s not even mention how incredible Matt Birchler’s Birchtree looks right now!”

Ghost has always been a source of curiosity for me, coming back to it from time to time to look and see how it is evolving. Following those two blog posts, I got back to one of my articles about a past experience with Ghost for photo sharing. At the time, it didn’t go well. Furthermore, I started using Substack to host my newsletter for unknown or clearly defined reasons. So, this time, I returned to Ghost to look at it as an alternative to Substack. Why? After all, I was quite happy with Substack. And yet… If I look at Substack and Ghost, there are many things that made me dubious of my choices.

I don’t get any subscribers from Substack Discovery because Substack is very popular these days.
I prefer the way Ghost handles the publishing process and the distinction between having a CMS and a newsletters publishing platform within the same platform.
Ghost’s API supports text editors like Ulysses, which would help speed up the process of creating newsletter issues. By working directly with Ulysses, each new issue would be much easier to put together, as Ulysses supports templates, while Substack doesn’t. Since the basic structure of my newsletter stays the same each month, using a template makes perfect sense.
Substack offers some visual customization options, but they are quite limited. On the other hand, Ghost offers themes that help make a more personal-looking website.
Ghost supports Unsplash, which is a must for me.
Ghost provides better support for photos than in Substack with photo galleries. This could prove to be useful for my photo legend series, among other use cases.
Integration of plausible analytics is easy, but it is not possible with Substack. Another must-have for me.
Stripe integration, which I already use for Medium payments, if I ever choose to add a paid tier to my newsletter.
Commenting is possible by tweaking the theme and adding some integration code. Yet, I wish there was a better and easier way to add this to a website. In the future, I could try to set up Commento for comments using this procedure. Ghost theme customization is available only on mid-tier and up-paid plans. This feature could replace the thread feature available on Substack.
Good integration with Buffer via Zapier. IFTTT integration is possible only via RSS feeds. As a paying member of IFTTT, I chose the latter.
Better RSS feeds support posts, tags, and pages just by adding /RSS to any URL. On top of that, it is possible to customize the webpage referring to a tag by adding a header image and a description, just like here for the Photo Legend Series.
Selecting a fully featured theme is challenging, as Ghost doesn’t provide an easy way to filter themes by supported features.
I’ll leave my Substack account active for the Substack Reader feature.
Easy migration path from Substack to Ghost using this procedure.
Should I import my content? After a short test run using the 14-day evaluation period, it was clear that I had to.

How Ghost could be improved for me?

One of the Ghost editor’s most powerful and useful features is the ability to create and reuse content snippets. If you’ve ever used an email client with saved replies, this will be immediately intuitive.

Integration features and custom themes for the entry-level paid plan (access to the API admin token).
A customizable dashboard.
A native client on Mac or iPad.

Steps to move from Substack to Ghost

I exported my data from Substack, which took less than 10 minutes to complete. Substack makes this super easy.
Import my subscribers list into Ghost’s members list.
Download Xcode from the Mac App Store and launch it for default configuration (required for the next step).
Install Homebrew to be able to install NPM modules later (importing content into Ghost requires Node.js and NPM modules): https://treehouse.github.io/installation-guides/mac/homebrew
Install Node.js and NPM: https://treehouse.github.io/installation-guides/mac/node-mac.html
Follow this procedure to import articles into Ghost CMS. This is done via the command line.

`migrate substack numericcitizen-export-2021-11-14-m9k19kr99s/posts.csv –readPosts numericcitizen-export-2021-11-14-m9k19kr99s/posts –url https://numericcitizen.substack.com –useMetaImage –useMetaAuthor –drafts false

`A lot of my decision to switch depended on the success of this step. If content was successfully imported without too much required tweaks, I would consider this a success and go with the next steps.
Import the created zip file (the migrate command generated a 230 MB zip file ready to import). This file was then imported using this procedure.
Configure site pages and tags Once the import is complete and without error.
Review imported content and set tags according to each post’s content. That step was tedious but was mandatory to recreate the same content structure currently on my Substack website.
Configure and write a contact page so that users can click from the bottom portion of my Ghost website to contact me.
Connect my Ghost account to my Stripe account just in case, even though my newsletter is free—you never know!
Configure Ulysses publishing options to publish content from within the application to Ghost. After all, this was one of the main reasons I switched from Substack to Ghost, right?
Do a test run with a fake article and check RSS feed content generation.
Configure the support and reply-to email addresses.
Set up Plausible analytics and add it to my Ghost website using the customization feature in the header section.
Update all my IFTTT automations for cross-posting to Twitter via Buffer when a newsletter issue comes out.
For mid-tier paid plans only: Add Twitter Revue new sign-up to Ghost via Zapier (this requires the Admin API token, which is not available in the entry-level paid tier).
For mid-tier paid plans only: Add Ghost cross-posting to Buffer via Zapier (this requires the Admin API token unavailable in the entry-level paid tier.)

It took me about a day of work to accomplish all this, from the trigger to the final announcement post on Substack. I’m super happy with the end results.

Migrating My Content From HEY World to Substack

Sun, 16 May 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Yesterday, I put an end to my HEY World experiment. After making the call, I wanted to keep my content and migrate it to Substack. So, I tried the Substack RSS feed import feature, but it wasn’t working. As shown in the following screenshot, the error wasn’t explicit enough to pinpoint the cause of the problem.

I had 23 posts to import, which was not a big deal, but I preferred not to move my content manually. Trying different variations of the URL didn’t help. Substack wouldn’t detect any feeds from HEY World. Here is my solution.

HEY World uses ATOM RSS feed format. I thought Substack couldn’t parse those. The idea was to transform the ATOM RSS feed into something else. After googling for a solution, I remembered about RSSMix (this service is no longer available and FeedPress is way better). This free web service enables merging many feeds into one. I use it to merge all my personal RSS feeds into a single one to build a publishing timeline. It’s pretty cool¹. For my HEY World content migration, I took the ATOM RSS feed with another one and merged the content². The end result is another feed, but this time in XML format. I went to Substack again, and sure enough, the resulting feed could be imported. After the import was completed, all I had to do was delete posts from the second feed content which wasn’t part of HEY World³. Simple as that.

Update #1: 2022-05-22 : Since the publication of this article, I moved (again) my newsletter to Ghost. Update #2: 2024-06-15 : Replace RSSmix with FeedPress as the former is no longer available

I think I should write about it in a different post. ↩︎
RSSMix requires at least two RSS feeds to work. I chose one of mine with little content associated with it. ↩︎
The one thing I would have liked from Substack was a way to select each post individually before hitting the Import button. ↩︎

Bye Bye Universe — It Was a Nice Ride

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 06:15:00 -0400

Nearly a year ago, I introduced my Numeric Citizen Visual Space, a website made with Universe, a website creation application running on iPhone, iPad and macOS. This space never really took off and never attracted traffic, probably because of its lack of a social network dimension. In retrospect, this was an experiment more than anything else. Universe is a special application where websites are built using a visual block metaphor. There is nothing like it. I was seduced by it and forgot the goal of building a web presence to expose my urban exploration photography work. Eventually, I stopped updating the website. I decided to cancel my subscription ($159.99 CAN per year, which is rather expensive if you ask me). If there was a free tier, I would probably keep it, but that’s not the case.

I’m still looking for a better photo sharing solution besides the usual suspects. Glass? Bokeh? Both of these are still under wrap, and their future is uncertain. As I’m waiting, I decided to “park” my work on a lesser-known place called “Ello”. Ello is a lot like Tumblr. It’s free and does the job for now.

Update 2024-06-06: Ello and Bokeh are no longer being developed and were abandoned.

Getting Ready for Google's May 2021 Algorithm Update

Sat, 17 Apr 2021 10:00:00 -0400

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

My blog visitors traffic from 2019 to 2021.

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

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

And, from Liz Moorehead of ImpactPlus:

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

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

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

The starting point

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

Initial scorecard for the desktop version of Numeric Citizen Blog.

Initial scorecard for the mobile version of Numeric Citizen Blog with AMP pages enabled.

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

Improving the mobile experience

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

Blog visitors by device types.

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

Revisiting my WordPress plug-in usage

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

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

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

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

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

Adding two optimization services to my toolbox

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other considerations

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

_Imagify-optimization-results.png

My website performance by geographic locations

_Speed-access-by-geo-locations.png

My website visitors’ origins

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

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

Final scores and looking forward

Final scorecard for the desktop version.

Final scorecard for the mobile version with AMP pages enabled.

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

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

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

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

I wasn’t the only victim of Google’s action. ↩︎
This change prompted me to change the type of content that I post on my main blog: longer posts with more meaningful content. ↩︎
Another useful tool is GTmetrix. ↩︎
Anyway, I recently reduced my Twitter usage by a lot, as fully documented in this blog post. ↩︎
IndieWeb plugins provide a useful integration of comments from other websites. ↩︎
According to my research, my blog is hosted on WordPress.com in the US, where most of my visitors come from. ↩︎
WP Rocket offers a CDN service for 7$ a month. I’m not willing to pay for that. ↩︎

Should I Try Write.As? I Came, I Saw, Then I Left

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 07:00:00 -0400

I saw someone on Micro.blog using Write.as a platform for publishing a blog. After spending a few minutes on the blog and Write.as website, I find it very tempting; it’s clean, super simple, well-thought-out, and cheap. Maybe I should try it? Or maybe not. I’m already spread too thin. I feel it would be another rabbit hole. If all my current platforms were fully satisfying, I wouldn’t be looking at other places.

At the very least, I could open a free account and see if my impressions are valid.

[Update #1: 2022-05-19: I did take advantage of a special pricing for a five years subscription. You can find me on write.as: https://write.as/numericcitizen/]

[Update #2: 2024-05-20: I no longer use write.as since earlier this year. I deciced to bring the content to my main blog instead.]

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. ↩︎

Ghost 4 is Out! So What?

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 06:45:00 -0400

Ghost 4 is out, but is lacking one major feature.

Now, at version 4, Ghost, a self-hosting publishing platform, is buzzing again. To me, Ghost always looked like a modern version of WordPress. They share many similarities. The close integration of website and newsletter publishing is way better than it is on Substack. I’m thinking, what if I moved my main blog over there? I was tempted once to make a move. Others discuss why moving from one platform to another might be a bad idea. Matt Birchler:

“As I look at this Ghost 4.0 stuff focused on newsletters, my mind naturally goes, “ooh, I could use that, let me switch platforms!”

But the lack of a native mobile client for the iPhone or iPad was and still is a deal-breaker. For an open platform with APIs, it’s surprising no real client exists. Ulysses supports publishing on Ghost, but that isn’t enough. Oh, and those analytics—aren’t they too much?

Ghost 4 has lots of new stuff with issues. I’ll pass.

[Update #1: 2022-05-20: My monthly newsletter has been migrated to Ghost as I wrote in my last article on Substack]

Tips and Tricks on Optimizing Articles Exposure on Medium

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 20:00:00 -0400

To make a dent on Medium, optimizing exposure is a must.

I’ve been on Medium for many years, and I learned a few tips on maximizing article exposure along the way. These tips and tricks made a difference for me.

If you plan to submit an article to a Medium publication, beware of busy publications: the exposure might not be what you expect. The turnover is too high, and your article won’t stay fresh for long. One example of such a busy publication is Mac’O Clock $^1$ . I did publish many articles for them over time. My content does get some traction, but it is for a very short period of time.
Articles like “The Top 5 Utilities for macOS” are really popular. Opinionated articles tend to perform well, too. “The Rotten Side of Tim Cook’s Apple” is such an example. This article was published by The Startup $^2$ ****, not on the Apple-centric Mac’O Clock. It still receives regular views and reads.
Allow some content to be published outside the Medium paywall to increase your chances of being noticed (cross-post a link on Twitter, for example). It’s a difficult balance to achieve, though. If your article is interesting, people will get it for free; you’ll leave money on the table. Consider doing this as giving samples of your quality work.
Publish on your term. Some publications require submitting an article in draft mode (not yet published). Depending on the publication owner’s schedule, it may require up to a few days before your article gets published. Sometimes, timing is everything. Consider publishing on your own if that’s the case.
Reviews of hot tech gadgets are also popular, particularly from Apple.

Your mileage may vary. Many articles on how to be successful are already available on Medium. Search for them. You’ll get a better picture.

This article should have been published on Medium, behind their paywall, because it usually gets a lot of traction. Oh, well. I feel generous today $^3$ .

I hate this magazine name.
Contrary to its name, the magazine has little to do with startups.
It will end up on Medium, but in a few days from being published here.

Cleaning up my WordPress Blog

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Simpler is better.

If you know about WordPress, you probably know how bloated your WordPress site can become with heavy visual themes and lots of more or less useful plugins installed. Those using WordPress.com for hosting their WordPress website know how pushy WordPress.com can be. They really want you to use WooCommerce or ExactMetrics. I decided to do some spring cleanup this week by removing WooCommerce. Why did I have it set up?

During my early days on WordPress.com, I had the idea to allow readers to support me financially. I implemented WooCommerce to enable payment options, but it turns out that readers don’t often tip bloggers. So, I made the decision to remove the Tips page and disable WooCommerce. The result? My website now feels more responsive and visually appealing, a testament to the benefits of decluttering.

I should continue to remove unneeded features. Next up is the footer portion, which contains redundant features, and my sidebar, which contains my most recent tweets. They don’t really add value to the content. My main blog is available here: https://numericcitizien.me.

A Really Useful Git Beginner’s Guide

Sun, 14 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0400

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

This Blog Uses Commento - Here is Why - Updated 2024-03-10

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 11:30:00 -0400

You can leave a comment on each blog post, thanks to Commento, you’re not being tracked.

When I created the Numeric Citizen I/O blog, I thought it would need a way for visitors to be able to leave comments as they see fit. I decided to go the Commento route because of its tight integration with Blot, but also for a more profound reason: privacy protection. According to Commento’s website:

Commento is more than just a comments widget you can embed — it’s a return to the roots of the internet. An internet without the tracking and invasions of privacy. An internet that is simple and lightweight. An internet that is focused on interesting discussions, not ads. A better internet.

There are no ads with Commento, so there is no need to track users. The weight of the script needed to add Commento support is light. Commento is easy to use for end-users and doesn’t require an account to publish a comment. But, if you prefer, you can use your Twitter account, your Google account, your Github account, etc, to identify yourself with the service before posting your comments. The design is nice and simple. Commento is not a free service, but I’m paying $99/year for it. That’s the price that I’m willing to pay so my readers aren’t tracked.

Enabling Commento on this blog was dead simple

Do you want to try the end-user experience? Please respond to this blog post; you’ll see. Thanks in advance.

Update: 2022-11-15: Since this blog is no longer hosted on Blot.im, comments are handled “automagically” by Craft as a Craft-based document. Update: 2024-04-10: This content is now hosted on Micro.blog. You can reply to this post by using the provided buttons, below.

Testing wall.blot.im

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 21:30:00 -0400

Testing a web-based blog post publishing tool for posting directly to Blot from a webpage.

I’m currently testing a straightforward blog post publishing tool running on a webpage. The tool is accessible at https://wall.blot.im. I wrote a front matter; I guess Blot will process it as usual. The editor provides a character count, a word count, and a way to export the current blog post or publish it directly on my Blot website. Once published, I guess that I’ll have to do a “pull” from my Git client to sync the newly published content with my local repo clone. Let’s try this. Nope. It won’t work unless I use Dropbox, not Git. Too bad. Returning to normal programming in 3, 2, 1.

Learning a Bit of Blot’s Internals

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0400

I made a few layout changes to my archives page.

Someone on Micro.blog posted something from its Blot website and I noticed he was using an unknown meta tag in the post’s front matter: metadata.icon. He used a tag to add an icon to each of its blog post. I wanted to know how Blot actually used this tag to format the blog post, so I asked the guy. His answer made me look deeper into Blot processing of meta tags. After some readings, I decided to change the content of the archives page to use the “summary” tag after each blog post title. It is super easy to edit Blot templates. In that case, it was a matter of adding a {{summary}} tag like this:

Adding the summary tag to the archives.html template.

The Initial Blot Setup

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0400

Setting up this blog with Blot was pretty straightforward.

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

Blot’s dashboard page for this blog.

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

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

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

The Blot settings page for this blog.

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

As I’m porting this content to my Micro.blog hosted metablog, I recognize that nothing is permanent. ↩︎

Where Micro.blog Fails for Me

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 10:30:00 -0400

I’ve been a user of Micro.blog since 2018. At first, I wasn’t sure I would like the place. Eventually, it grew on me because it is such a quiet place¹, with more engagement from the community members and with much more respect. There is something that I don’t like about Micro.blog, though. It’s the lack of easy control over the visual appearance of my blog.

Micro.blog is based on Hugo, a static site generator. It’s pretty flexible, fast and open-source. My current understanding of Micro.blog is that it doesn’t expose all of Hugo’s controls, only a subset of them. I’m ok with this, as Hugo is not for the faint of heart. Yet, I’m not ok with the look of my microblog. I want to make it more personal, less like a generic website based on a frequently used visual theme. To make changes, I need to know about HTML (I’m kind of okay with this) and CSS (I’m not okay with this!). CSS is the weirdest thing I have ever encountered in my digital life. What a messy “language”². No amount of reading or YouTube videos will make it understandable for me.

Another solution would be to import an already-made Hugo theme in Hugo. The other issue with Micro.blog is that it isn’t easy to import open-source Hugo-based themes. They need to be “ported”. Again, it’s not something I want to mess with. I recently started to think that maybe it was time to have my own microblog hosted somewhere to get complete control of the visual appearance. Installing Hugo on my M1-based Mac mini is simple. Having a publishing pipeline from my machine to the web looks pretty easy, too. It’s only the beginning. Even with great articles like this one, I find it difficult to wrap my head around it.

After much reading, I changed my mind and settled on the “Hyde” theme of Micro.blog. I would lose too much if I were to be alone, and new challenges would certainly arise. I hope for Micro.blog to keep evolving, especially in the area of better customization. I asked its founder to open up its roadmap. I’m anxiously waiting to see what’s next.

Compared to Twitter. ↩︎
Not a language but a formalism for visual rendering of content. ↩︎

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

From My RSS Feeds To Day One

My Content Creation Ecosystem - Fall 2025 Update

Now on Chillidog Hosting

Generative AI Applied to Website Analytics - Cool

A Mandatory Update to my Content Creation Ecosystem

What is POSSE

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

Until next time

Why So Many Publishing Platforms?

Browsing Past Published Articles on Ghost

My Content Creator Workflow as of 2023-11

Welcome AI, welcome ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney

A new setup to share files easily

Bye bye to my Digital Garden

A fun experience with Tinylytics

Google Sheets is out too

Brief

Why It’s So Hard to Make Up My Mind About Digital Tools?

There is hope

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?

The Write.freely Ecosystem Explained

An Overview of the WriteFreely Ecosystem

Some remarks about the whole thing

My Content Creator Workflow as of 2022-12

A Peek At My Photo Processing Workflow

What’s in

What’s out

Miscellaneous

Concluding words

Saving Plausible Analytics for Blot.im

This Blog Is Transitioning to Craft-Based Hosting Soon

Why This Change

What You Need To Know

Looking Forward

Making YouTubes Videos - Observations & Notes

I’m Ready to Move This Website to Craft

On Migrating WordPress Content to Ghost

Observations

My Blogger Workflow as of 2021-12

What’s in

What’s out

In progress

Things to improve

Miscellaneous

Moving From Substack to Ghost — My Experience

How Ghost could be improved for me?

Steps to move from Substack to Ghost

Migrating My Content From HEY World to Substack

Bye Bye Universe — It Was a Nice Ride

Getting Ready for Google's May 2021 Algorithm Update

The starting point

Improving the mobile experience

Revisiting my WordPress plug-in usage

Adding two optimization services to my toolbox

Other considerations

Final scores and looking forward

Should I Try Write.As? I Came, I Saw, Then I Left

My Blogger Workflow as of 2021-03

Under consideration

Closing remarks

Ghost 4 is Out! So What?

Tips and Tricks on Optimizing Articles Exposure on Medium

Cleaning up my WordPress Blog

A Really Useful Git Beginner’s Guide

This Blog Uses Commento - Here is Why - Updated 2024-03-10

Testing wall.blot.im

Learning a Bit of Blot’s Internals

The Initial Blot Setup

Where Micro.blog Fails for Me