It’s the time of the year where I start to think of my upcoming year from a content creation perspective and as someone who likes to try new things. Here are a few things that I’m going to explore. First, as a subscriber of SoundCloud, I’m finding it hard to find content for my DJ mixing experimentation. More often than not, those publishing content on SoundCloud wants you to buy  what's available on Beatport. Someone told me recently to use Beatport instead. I may switch from SoundCloud to Beatport for 2023. Second, I’ll continue my slow migration from Smugmug to my Exposure page. Smugmug was good but didn’t fit well with what I expected from a modern photo-sharing service. Third, I finally found a use case for recording videos with CleanShot. I’ll use it to add short video clips showing how to use specific features and tricks in Craft. Those clips will be added to The Craft Bible (a website dedicated to Craft, the document writing app) and will come as a complement to my YouTube channel. It’s fun to be full of projects.

Thanks to all who replied to my question regarding Mastodon. What a great community over here! Never had this in fifteen years on Twitter. 😊

Here are a few takeaways (many may be obvious, duh!). 

1. Just like for emails, one cannot "reserve" a username in the Mastodon-friendly world. Makes sense.
2. Registering with a specific instance (or server) is mandatory just like opening an account with an email provider. 
3. Using a custom domain that I own is something I should consider doing. 
4. I should probably go ahead with my custom domain name for Micro.blog before doing anything related to Mastodon. 
5. Setting my websites (I do have a few) to display my Mastodon username or profile is a good idea too. 
6. Setting my Mastodon profile to display my website is another good practice.
7. Finding an instance I can relate to is probably the most daunting task if my research is any indication. I didn’t find any so far. 
8. I still don’t understand how a Micro.blog compatible Mastodon name is helping in any of this. 
9. Having a registered account on a Mastodon won’t do much for me. I already get everything I want on Micro.blog. People can follow me from their Mastodon instance, and I can, too, from Micro.blog. 
10. Thinking about all this on Christmas day shows that I don’t have a life! LOL

Anyway, happy holidays to you all! 👋

After watching a recent video from Matt Birchler about Rewind, a constant screen recording utility for the Mac, I was excited to give my email address and get onboard the waiting list for early access to the app. I got my invite a few days ago. As much as I would like to test this app, here's this deal-breaker for me: 20 US$ per month to get on the early access program, no thank you. Why?

I understand Rewind is still in beta, but the developer wants me to pay for testing the application. Shouldn’t it be the other way around so I get a rebate when the app goes out of beta? I mean, even with a 30-day “trial” I still can’t get over this. If it’s 20 US$ a month now for the early access, what will be the price of the final product then? Even more expansive?

Rewind makes me think of CleanShot, and I find Rewind’s pricing overly expansive if I think about the scope of both apps. 

Rewind is a great idea, even if it pauses many security risks, but I’ll pass for now.

I could save more than a whopping 400$ annually by shutting down my Twitter accounts. Thanks to the potential removal of a few service subscriptions from my workflow and potentially unjustified without Twitter in my digital life: Buffer, Typefully, Mailbrew. 

It’s incredible how thinking about my Twitter reliance makes me realize so many things on so many levels in my content creation workflow.

I finally found how to reconfigure my Mailbrew account to log in without using Twitter. Good thing. I don’t log in often in Mailbrew, but this morning I learned that I’d need to adjust many things when I close my Twitter account. As an example, this newsletter setup will need to be revisited to remove any references to Twitter as a data source.

Mailbrew is an excellent tool for generating newsletters, but it hasn’t been updated for quite a while (October of 2021, according to the change log). The developers behind Mailbrew are too busy working on their other product: Typefully, a web service for writing Twitter threads. I’m subscribing to both services. Typefully was cool when it launched but being entirely dependent on Twitter puts them in danger IMHO. I don’t use Typefully much, preferring Buffer for scheduling cross-posted content to Twitter, something Typefully doesn’t support. 

It’s sad to see Mailbrew coming to a halt. Typefully will go down the drain with my Twitter account closure next year.