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

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

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

And, from Liz Moorehead of ImpactPlus:

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

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

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

The starting point

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

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

Improving the mobile experience

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

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

Revisiting my WordPress plug-in usage

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

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

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

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

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

Adding two optimization services to my toolbox

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other considerations

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

My website performance by geographic locations

My website visitors’ origins

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

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

Final scores and looking forward

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

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

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

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

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.]

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

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

Under consideration

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

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

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

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

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

Closing remarks

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

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]

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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$^3$.

1. I hate this magazine name.

2. Contrary to its name, the magazine has little to do with startups.

3. It will end up on Medium, but in a few days from being published here.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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:

Setting up this blog with Blot was pretty straightforward.

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

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

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

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

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

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.