This article is about how I’m using Craft and Things 3, which is behind any short or long article I share online. Here is what happens when I get a new post idea.

1. In Things 3, Create an entry and set priority and desired or expected date of publication if known.
2. In Craft, I create a new document, set the title and then copy the document’s deeplink to the clipboard.
3. Still within Craft, I move the newly created document to the appropriate folder.
4. Still within Craft, I update my private creator dashboard document optionally.
5. Back to Things 3, and I paste the deeplink into the note field. It’s handy to jump from Things 3 to Craft with a single tap.

At this point, I can start my research, writing and editing of my article or blog post in Craft. Now, here is what happens after publishing my article:

1. Mark the to-do item as done in Things 3.
2. I update my private creator dashboard document by converting my deeplink to a new permalink that I put in the Recently Published section.
3. I monitor the appropriate RSS feed for quality control. See this article about subscribing to my own RSS feeds.

There you have it. Craft plays a central role in my blogger workflow¹. This blog post exposes what happens at the beginning and at the end of a new post idea. I hope you enjoyed it and maybe learned something.

I recently got a few comments and questions from some followers on Micro.blog about my use of Scribbles versus Micro.blog blog hosting services. One guy couldn’t figure out why I was using Scribbles to write very short posts using a one-word title while I was using Micro.blog for longer posts, most of them without a title. I replied with a short answer, but I think I should elaborate for those who have been following me for some time or for those who just got here.

I use three distinct sites for posting written content. My main website (https://numericcitizen.me ), which came first, is currently hosted on Ghost. Next is my Micro.blog site (https://blog.numericcitizen.me), and, more recently, I added another small website hosted on Scribbles https://blips.numericcitizen.me. Let me explain each site’s purposes.

My main website is for posting longer articles like tech reviews (like “Five tools for efficient bloggers”) or for sharing long takes on a specific subject (like: “Five Steps for leaving Twitter”). My publication velocity is about one article per week. This is where my weekly creative summary newsletter gets published, thanks to Ghost’s built-in newsletter capabilities.

My second website is my daily blog, called “my blog,” and is where I post comments and thoughts about Apple, tech, photography, apps and services, and many other things. My blogging site is part of Micro.blog, there is a small community around it, thanks to Micro.blog fediverse support. Somehow, Micro.blog replaced Twitter for me, more than my presence on Mastodon did. I usually post around 10-20 weekly posts on Micro.blog. I like this place a lot for so many reasons.

I recently started using Scribbles, a small blog hosting service I like and want to support. I’m using this service to post short thoughts using a single-word title. These posts are then cross-posted to my Micro.blog timeline with a link going back to my Scribbles site. You can see an example of such a post appearing on my Micro.blog timeline in the following screenshot. Each post sports two emojis to help me spot them in my timeline. One thing I try to do is not to be too clickbait with my single-word title. The chosen word must be evocative or related to the post content.

The post on Scribbles gets cross-posted on my Micro.blog timeline by using one of the coolest features of Micro.blog: cross-posting of content coming from RSS feeds. This is shown in the following screenshot.

Micro.blog picks up posts from the Scribbles website RSS feed and will post content on my timeline, as well as cross-post it to Mastodon and Bluesky. This is POSSE in action. I’m a believer.

When I first thought about writing this article, I wasn’t sure where it would end up being shared. However, as the article grew in length and covered my blogging habits, it became obvious that it would go on my meta website, which is another one of my websites. There you have it.

I recently got a few comments and questions from some followers on Micro.blog about my use of Scribbles versus Micro.blog blog hosting services. One guy couldn’t figure out why I was using Scribbles to write very short posts using a one-word title while I was using Micro.blog for longer posts, most of them without a title. I replied with a short answer, but I think I should elaborate for those who have been following me for some time or for those who just got here.

I use three distinct sites for posting written content. My main website (https://numericcitizen.me ), which came first, is currently hosted on Ghost. Next is my Micro.blog site (https://blog.numericcitizen.me) and, more recently, I added another small website hosted on Scribbles https://blips.numericcitizen.me. Let me explain each site’s purposes.

My main website is for posting longer articles like tech reviews (like “Five tools for efficient bloggers”) or for sharing long takes on a specific subject (like: “Five Steps for leaving Twitter”). My publication velocity is about one article per week. This is where my weekly creative summary newsletter gets published, thanks to Ghost’s builtin newsletter capabilities.

My second website is my daily blog, called “my blog,” and is where I post comments and thoughts about Apple, tech, photography, apps and services, and many other things. My blogging site is part of Micro.blog, there is a small community around it, thanks to Micro.blog fediverse support. Somehow, Micro.blog replaced Twitter for me, more than my presence on Mastodon did. I usually post around 10-20 weekly posts on Micro.blog. I like this place a lot for so many reasons.

I recently started using Scribbles, a small blog hosting service I like and want to support. I’m using this service to post short thoughts using a single-word title. These posts are then cross-posted to my Micro.blog timeline with a link going back to my Scribbles site. You can see an example of such a post appearing on my Micro.blog timeline in the following screenshot. Each post sports two emojis to help me spot them in my timeline. One thing I try to do is not to be too clickbait with my single-word title. The chosen word must be evocative or related to the post content.

The post on Scribbles gets cross-posted on my Micro.blog timeline by using one of the coolest features of Micro.blog: cross-posting of content coming from RSS feeds. This is shown in the following screenshot.

Micro.blog picks up posts from the Scribbles website RSS feed and will post content on my timeline, as well as cross-post it to Mastodon and Bluesky. This is POSSE in action. I’m a believer.

When I first thought about writing this article, I wasn’t sure where it would end up being shared. However, as the article grew in length and covered my blogging habits, it became obvious that it would go on my meta website, which is another one of my websites. There you have it.

Have you ever searched the web for an article where you couldn’t see when it was published? It happens to me quite often. I don’t understand why such important information isn’t communicated to the readers.

In a fast-moving numeric world, the publishing date helps the reader gauge the content’s relevancy. I set the publication date on all my websites because it adds context to the content. When I created Numeric Citizen I/O, I used a post slug format that includes the publication date. The path to the webpage is shown in search results, which makes searching the web a more useful experience. Below are examples of URLs to my websites.

https://numericcitizen.micro.blog/2021/03/07/about-those-webp.html

https://numericcitizen.me/2021/02/27/porting-office-work-a-bad-idea/

Update 2022-11-15: Sadly, since moving to a Craft-based hosting solution, the URL can no longer include the publication date. If you are a business plan subscriber, the workaround is to set the document as a separate website individually.

Update 2024-03-15: I realized that when I moved from WordPress to Ghost, I lost this notion of date in the URL. All previous content is still accessible using the old URL format, but newly published content no longer contains the publication date in the article’s URL. We cannot have it all, I guess.

This article was first published on 2021-03-17.

Let’s say I stumble on an article I wish to read and process. I’ll follow the following steps, covering the collection and archival stages.

1. Save the article in Omnivore¹,².
2. Set tags in Omnivore.
3. Read the article, highlight text as needed and write comments if required.
4. Summarize the article using Raycast AI. I have a Keyboard Maestro macro for that.
5. Copy and paste the summary into the Omnivore notebook accompanying the article.
6. Archive the article in Omnivore.
7. Export the Readwise highlights (done automatically from Omnivore syncing).
8. Import the created markdown files into Bear.
9. Adjust tags if required.

I realize this workflow is essentially for the Mac. Nothing like this can be done on the iPad without a major tweak or two.

You can find this article on the “My Micro-Workflows Explained” website.

The many facets of my reading workflow needed to be examined and studied. When do I read, using which device and application? How is my reading affecting or contributing to my creative workflow? What happens when I find something interesting while I’m reading? How do I store important information pieces? How do I get back to them? How often and for what purpose? The answer to these numerous questions drive my choice of application for reading.

I’ve been thinking for a long time about ways to improve my reading workflow for a few reasons. First, I want to read more and more consistently. Two, I’m not sure which app is better to support this. I’ve been switching read-later service many times and until now, I wasn’t able to settle on one. Third, when reading, I want to get the most out of it and use the gathered knowledge more effectively. The following diagram depicts the flow of my reading workflow, inspired by the CODE methodology. Each box is explained in more detail below.

First, let’s start with my possible reading sources.

1. RSS feeds can be imported directly into Omnivore by using the RSS feed address. I follow a few dozen feeds via Inoreader and Reeder, but just a few are selected to go directly into Omnivore for the quality of their content. As I’m writing this, four feeds are configured for direct importation. This feature was only recently introduced into Omnivore, and it works great. Occasionally, I go into Omnivore, select the RSS tag and start reading from there.

2. Reeder is a very popular RSS reader. There are so many of them, but something hard to describe in Reeder sets it apart. Simplicity but not simplistic might be a good characterization. Reeder is also a great Inoreader client. Recently, I decided that for interesting articles in Reeder that I want to read, I save them into Things 3. One of the reasons is that when the article is read and analyzed, I can check it off from the to-do list, and Things will log this into the LogBook. I like the journaling capabilities of Things 3. I use it in my weekly creative summary.

3. Safari is my go-to browser. Surfing the web triggers reading opportunities. When I’m not ready to plunge into a 2500-word article, I use the Omnivore Safari extension to save it for a read later occasion. Another possibility is to save a bookmark directly into Craft from Safari (via Copy & Paste, thanks to Craft Safari extension limitations). When this happens, it’s because I was looking for something in Safari and needed to keep the bookmark for later use. The same process sometimes happens right in Reeder. In that case, a simple “copy & paste” of the bookmark is executed from Reeder to Craft. But, overall, I try to save a bookmark into Things 3 for the same reason I do it from Reeder. Things 3 helps me keep track in an effective way of all my future readings.

4. Things 3 helps me manage and be consistent with my creative activities. Unsurprisingly, it plays a role in the Collect portion of my CODE workflow. For each article I plan to read and possibly analyze, I create a new task in Things 3 with a link to the article in the task’s note. As I wrote previously, each time I check an item from the list, the item is logged in Things 3’s logbook. This way, I keep track of what I have read and when.

5. From Things 3, I’ll open the link in Safari for the article I decided to read. Sadly, I cannot save the link from Things 3 to Omnivore directly. It’s possible only through Omnivore’s Safari extension. From there, if I think the article is long enough and needs more thorough reading, I’ll send it to Omnivore. I might save the bookmark into Craft also, depending on my needs. I often visit an article only to copy and paste its URL into a Craft document as a reference. However, I could directly import the article’s content into a new Craft document using a “CraftClip” shortcut. In this scenario, I want to import knowledge into Craft to backlink to it and select the portion to include as a quote in another document.
6. Omnivore is my go-to “read-later” service. I won’t write a review here (maybe for another article). Once the content is saved into Omnivore (via the Safari browser extension or automatically from the few selected RSS feeds, articles are stored in Omnivore’s Inbox and are available for reading, highlighting, annotation and tagging. The nice thing about Omnivore is that it is free, it is constantly evolving, and, more importantly, I can copy and paste all my highlights and annotations in one click and paste them into a Craft document, and they will be formatted exactly the way it should be.
7. Omnivore highlights are synced to Readwise. I also copy and paste the link to the stored article back into Craft for easier and quicker access.

8. Central to my creative workflow, Craft is a repository of bookmarks from Safari, Reeder, and highlights stored in Readwise. I import those from time to time to consolidate knowledge. Anybox, a bookmarks manager, has a different role of holding bookmarks about specific subjects without contextual information. This is why I don’t consider Anybox part of my reading workflow.
9. When working on a review or an article about a specific subject, I will create a unique document container in Craft based on a template I made (the template is available for sale here). Everything I read, potentially highlighted and annotated, might be stored in this container as a reference, a bookmark, or the full article. The idea is to bring related things closer together so I can build relations.

My reading workflow might look complex but it really isn’t. I’ve been testing it while reading articles about the iPhone 15 Pro Max. It’s not perfect but it is close to be just right for my needs. There are always possible improvements, but those will come in due time. Previously, my workflow was centered around Craft, you might take a look at the following video if you are curious.

My Reading Workflow Using Craft

Still to come: how do I read the newsletters I subscribe to? 🤔

In this blog post, I want to share a different “behind the scene” look at how I process information that will eventually give birth to a new blog post. It’s a bit different than the one I publish from time to time about my blogger workflow. This behind-the-scenes view emphasizes something vital to me: the process. Sure, the results are always important, but the process that leads to these results is equally important. Moreover, tools are involved in each process, which, for a blogger and writer like me, are applications and services. I often think that I love creating because I usually love to use tools in general, especially if they are well crafted. For example, the act of writing in a great writing app like Ulysses is a satisfying experience. So. let’s see how I do all this.

In general, my inspiration comes from my readings and my time spent on Inoreader. Each morning, I spend between thirty and ninety minutes doing just that: consuming content from many sources like RSS feeds, Reddit, etc. I do spend time on YouTube, but I’m mostly reading stuff. I spend less than 10% of my time on video consumption. I force myself into reading; it’s one of the best ways to find subjects to write about or get new post ideas. There is too much content available online; I do have to use applications to bookmark things to read later. For that, Inoreader and Anybox (review of Anybox here) help me bookmark articles on which I want to react or write in a very short time frame.

When I write, depending on the expected length, complexity or destination of the piece, I may write it down directly on Micro.blog or use their macOS application which is good enough. When I plan to publish on my main blog, I’ll go with Ulysses, which is the case for this current blog post.

Another important tool that I use is Craft. This application is a repository for many things like future articles in the research phase. I do use Anybox to collect all the pieces that will go in a future issue of my Numeric Citizen Introspection newsletter. Craft will support my writing process as I can reuse tidbits of information that I saved in there for longer posts. The more I use Craft, the more I depend on it for everything. This is why Craft has a special place in the following diagram, showing how all the pieces fit together. Finally, all references to my posts on Micro.blog are stored in Google Sheets so I can easily refer to and include them while writing. It’s a time saver.

I guess my process has nothing really special, but it is perfectly crafted for my needs. I do publish a lot, and I need to be as efficient as possible, and this process enables and supports it every day.

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.