Apps & Services
I love apps and enjoy testing new services to improve my workflows. These posts discuss my experiences with them.
-
I got a lot of positive reactions about my Micro.blog front end for writing and publishing posts in a simplified user experience. I wasn’t expecting that. To me, it might mean that it’s filling a small void in Micro.blog offerings. Thankfully, Micro.blog is an open “platform” which allows such experiments like mine.
Some people asked me to make my app open source. I’m hesitant. I don’t want to feel the pressure of having to support others in using my work but who would like to add their own touches. I think, for now, I’ll respectfully decline. I would rather encourage anyone to follow the same route that I did and experiment with the tooling. 👾
-
I won’t write my predictions for 2026, but I want to write about how I envision using different AI offerings to support my creative journey next year.
-
Craft & Inoreader in 2025
In 2025, two notable apps or services received numerous and meaningful updates: Craft and Inoreader. Craft received long-awaited tag support, with APIs and MCP support added. The latter two are quite transformative, and I expect 2026 to bring many new users to the app. Personally, I’m barely scratching the surface of Craft APIs. Craft is at the center of everything that I create, and I couldn’t think of a better app to support my creative journey. Continue reading →
-
It’s fascinating how building things with Claude AI and Vercel made me forget about my desire to expand my knowledge and experience of Apple Shortcuts. I no longer see the need for that. My wish, though, would be to see Apple bring a way to build Shortcuts using Apple Intelligence.
-
I see a lot of interest in my experiment with Vercel and Micro.blog if the reactions are any indication. I’m going to do a small write up about this. I didn’t expect my experiment to be successful. Can’t wait to share more details about this on meta.numericcitizen.me.
-
One of the reasons for building my own web app for posting to Micro.blog: having the title field and categories shown by default 😁🤣
-
And Now Microblog Poster Web App is Live!
It’s a web app (on Vercel) just for me to use so that I can write blog posts on the go with a clean UI. It’s my second web app on Vercel built entirely with Claude AI. Continue reading →
-
When I’m hitting my Claude AI credits allotment, it’s time to do something else. 😅
-
Moving from Apple Keynote to Freeform for my next content creation workflow diagram update. It’s a sneak peek. It was much easier to convert (a simple copy-and-paste was all that was needed to kick-start the process). I also made significant changes to the way certain things are presented.
-
Who's Right?
Apparently, web analytics is not an exact science. Here are three web analytics versions of the same period: from November 23rd to December 23rd (Top: Ghost Analytics, Middle: Plausible Analytics, and Bottom: Tinylytics). Plausible feels conservative, with about half as many unique visitors as Ghost, while Tinylytics seems to overestimate. The patterns are barely the same, too. Who’s right? Continue reading →
-
My wife and me quite extensively used a group conversation in ChatGPT to help us face some health-related issues. It was beneficial to a visit to the hospital and still is after the visit yesterday. It is so much more helpful than having to google things and try to figure out what is going on.
-
Consuming AI Can Be Expensive
While experimenting with n8n and LLM services, I realize that using artificial intelligence can become a very costly hobby. The fact that the consumption of these services relies on two separate offerings — the subscription to the interactive service and on-demand billing for APIs — requires careful management and wise choices of providers. Currently, I use ChatGPT and Claude AI in interactive mode, but I also need a provider to access AI via APIs. Continue reading →
-
Woke up this morning and appreciated the results of my first n8n automation: a Craft Daily note with a list of topics for the day automagically created for the current day. I did use Craft Templates before, but I prefer the programmatic route because it enables much more powerful content creation by consuming different sources via APIs. For now, my automation doesn’t, but I’ll iterate on that.
-
My Learning Approach
Still exploring n8n, slowly but systematically. Because I’ll be using all sorts of external services like Craft, Micro.blog, Ghost, Inoreader, my strategy is to do individual integration tests instead of trying to build a biggy workflow and find all sorts of errors. Each of these micro experiments is forming the building blocks of something bigger. This approach is not different from the one I used for building iPhone apps and learning Objective-C and Interface Builder back in the day. Continue reading →
-
Just completed a one-hour WordPress+Email issue-debugging session with my daughter-in-law. It was a harsh reminder of how much I hate WordPress.
-
Got my first n8n instance up and running on DigitalOcean. Running 2.0.3. That was easy. Enough for tonight.
-
Started learning more about Vercel. I see a lot of people using it for many different things. Seems quite capable even on the free tier. I might need it for some projects involving Craft. 🤓 Anyone using Vercel here? Thoughts?
-
I knew I could build my Discord server, but didn’t really pay attention to it and couldn’t figure out what purpose it served. Now I do. So I created one so that, among my many use cases for this, it can receive a webhook call when one of my websites is down, thanks to Tinylytics’ webhook support.
-
Goodbye, IFTTT
It was a memorable, long journey. I officially shut down my IFTTT account tonight after over five years of use. It wasn’t costly, but I have the feeling that IFTTT started to trail behind competitive offerings like Zapier, Make and now n8n. It wasn’t the most user-friendly for debugging issues. Now, I’m turning my focus towards n8n. In the coming days and weeks, it will be my next digital playground for experimentation. Continue reading →
-
After testing Claude AI, agentic workflows and Craft this weekend, I’m genuinely thrilled about certain aspects of AI—it’s a level of excitement I haven’t felt since I first explored the web and started using the iPhone.