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.
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. I guess I’m a bottom-up kind of guy when it comes to understanding this kind of stuff.
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.
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.
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.
Just finished verifying my options for backing up my Synology NAS to the cloud and Synology C2 is still offers the cheapest option. Yet, it’s not cheap.
Seriously thinking of moving out of IFTTT to a self-hosted n8n instance on Digital Ocean. My IFTTT use case is simple: archiving RSS feed articles into Dayone. This seems quite possible to move this workflow into n8n automation.