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

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

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

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.

I’ve been quiet lately because I’ve been dedicating more time to learning Realmac Software Elements. I plan to create a few websites for fun. The first will be a new landing page to replace the current one shared with Craft Docs (look here). The second will be my professional website, which I’ll use when I transition to a freelance career. Ironically, the third will be a rework of my current employer’s corporate website, which I find quite unattractive.

So far, it’s a rather exciting journey. Elements is an excellent Mac app, and the team behind it offers a stellar presence on their support forums. This adds to the excitement of being part of a small club trying to build a new app. Elements is still in beta and should launch this year. You should see this video on YouTube showing the app’s user interface.

My experience with Elements reminds me of Apple’s iWeb website editor, which was part of the initial MobileMe rollout. However, Elements is much more powerful and geared toward a different crowd. The learning curve is much steeper, but it is reasonable for a guy like me. Elements is built around Tailwind CSS. I don’t know CSS or Tailwind CSS, but Elements hides its complexity.

Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework created by Adam Wathan and the team at Tailwind Labs in 2017. Designed to streamline web development, it provides a comprehensive set of low-level utility classes that allow developers to style elements directly in their HTML without writing custom CSS. This approach enables rapid prototyping and highly customizable designs, making Tailwind CSS a popular choice for developers seeking efficiency and flexibility in building modern web interfaces.

As soon as my first project matures enough, I’ll share more about it.

I finally completed the replication of content from the Craft-hosted website to Micro.blog-hosted website. I initiated this migration to reduce my dependency on Craft to host such content. Numeric Citizen I/O still points to Craft-hosted website (https://world.numericcitizen.io/meta), but 95% of the content is now available on Micro.blog via meta.numericcitizen.me.

Am I leaving Craft behind, not anytime soon, but I’m certainly continuing to consolidate my online presence under more open platforms.

In the blogging space, “open” can mean different things depending on who you ask. There are open-source tools and services. Opening yourself up while blogging is another example. Giving a behind-the-scenes look at your workflows is another. Furthermore, being an open blogger also means a desire to write about writing and blogging.

Open blogging, a new movement (my creation 😃), also means creating, maintaining and sharing a digital garden. It contains many things, such as a list of upcoming blog posts, work-in-progress articles, never-published articles, and other digital artifacts, all accessible just by following links within the digital garden. You can even peek at my website’s analytics, too, thanks to Plausible. It’s all there. Just be curious.

Being an open blogger also means using open-source tools and services whenever possible. Such services include Ghost, GitHub, Plausible, and Micro.blog. I believe that basic, foundational tools and platforms aren’t well served when big corporations own them. Oh, did I mention being part of Fediverse is also part of my platform choices?

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

On a more personal note, I openly share my anxieties about the challenges of being a blogger, writer, and content creator. Isn’t the website hosting this article, its mission after all? If you’re someone who reads all my content, on all the platforms I use, you can build a pretty good picture of who I am, what’s my values, my interests, my challenges. Each website fills a specific niche, but taken together, they form a web of content reflecting my interests in life.

I like writing about my experiences. Did you know that between 2009 and 2013, I was developing iPhone applications? While doing so, I attempted to maintain a blog about it. I wrote and published articles about my experience and the lessons I learned from iPhone intricacies. Today, I would like to write about blogging and share my experience with the applications and services I use for that purpose. I like doing this so much that I created this website about it: Numeric Citizen I/O. I maintain a meta-blog that exposes the behind-the-scenes of my workflow. Different context, same objectives. It’s my small contribution to this complicated world.

Thanks for reading.

In October 2024, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Canvas, designed to enhance the writing experience. Before ChatGPT Canvas, one writing approach using ChatGPT involved compiling these references into a ChatGPT project, then starting the writing process by using a first prompt, followed by another, and so forth. With ChatGPT Canvas, the approach promised to be more user-friendly, more interactive, more natural.

I wondered which writing project I could use to test this new conversational experience. For a long time, I’ve wanted to write about the data protection and privacy features offered by Apple’s ecosystem for iPhone and Mac users. I had already started gathering references from Apple’s support website and elsewhere on the internet. It was the perfect use case for this experiment.

ChatGPT Canvas starts off with a prompt, as usual, but now you include the term “canvas” in the request. The rest of the experience unfolds in an interface split into two sections: on the left side is the writing conversation, and on the right is the evolving draft. ChatGPT Canvas lets you interactively edit sections of text by selecting them first before requesting modifications. It’s highly interactive; somewhat like working with an editor in real-time. It’s very stimulating.

With “Protecting Your Digital Life: Privacy and Security Measures for Apple Users”, I had the opportunity to fully test this experience with my previously mentioned article project. ChatGPT was central to this writing project, but I also revised certain parts by removing or adding some content and by adding details that ChatGPT didn’t consider important enough to include. The result isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely better than what I would have written from scratch. I hope you enjoy reading it, and that you find the article informative. PS, the diagram is mine, not ChatGPT’s.

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:

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

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