So, apparently, just like Twitter, Reddit is entering into a “kill-third-party-apps” by charging an enormous amount of money to use their APIs. It looks like it. Apollo isn’t happy, and for good reasons. Unless there was a calculation error from the makers of Apollo, it just makes no sense for them to continue. Maybe Reddit made some calculation errors, too. Perhaps they fail to read the room’s temperature. But maybe they are entitled, to some degree, I guess, to charge for their APIs, right?

I’m tempted to make a parallel with Apple’s dreaded 15%-30% App Store commission. Is Apple’s stance on its App Store different from Reddit’s stance on its APIs? Is charging a commission to be on the App Store and take advantage of all Apple’s technology to get a chance to be distributed on hundreds of millions of iPhones similar to consuming a platform APIs? If not, what is different, actually? Is free API usage a dead end in today’s world? There are whole business models built around APIs these days. API speaks intellectual property in my book. Only companies with business models supported by massive ad distribution or expansive paid subscriptions can think of thriving by giving away their API access. It will be interesting to see how Reddit is reacting to third-party developers' pushback.

Oh, and if they actually kill the third-party Reddit client ecosystem, unlike Twitter, Reddit platform alternatives are not obvious to me.

I guess it’s time to remember: there is no such thing as a free lunch.

I’m more inclined and attracted by the idea of testing (and actually using) FCP on iPad than the Mac version. Without being an iMovie on steroids (something that I don’t want), I wish FCP for iPad to be a simpler (but not simplistic) version of FCP on the Mac.

The problem: all my videos are all done with Screenflow for Mac because It’s all about Mac screen recording. What value would bring another app like FCP for the iPad? I see a more complex workflow because I would need to “export” from Mac then import into FCP on iPad then do the actual montage on a less capable device (two different device paradigms, little added value).

Thoughts?

PS: My 2018 iPad Pro isn’t capable enough for my 4K screen recordings. But let’s imagine that I’m on an M1 or M2 iPad Pro.

Mimestream, a native Gmail email client, is out of beta and looks quite good if this video, by Matt Birchler, is any indication. As a subscriber to HEY, I can only salivate when I see such great Mac apps being launched for such a mature category. The guys behind HEY brag a lot about having a unique take on email, but they seriously lack in their take on being native because their software is not and is one of their biggest problems IMHO. If only they had the guts to rebuild their client like Mimestream, it would be a real killer for me.

Matt, the founder of the WriteFreely ecosystem, recently wrote a promising post:

It’s become clear over time that in order to make WriteFreely (and Write.as) as useful as it can be, it needs to have a much more unified experience.

…

I don’t think it makes sense for our self-hosted product to be chopped up into multiple components like our hosted tools are. Instead, I want to bring all those tools into a single application in WriteFreely.

Earlier this year, I wrote an article (“The Write.freely Ecosystem Explained”) trying to explain the WriteFreely ecosystem because I thought that, in its current form, it was a bit hard to grasp. It’s one of my most popular posts on Write.as. I think there is a need for unification and consolidation into a seamless experience. I’m glad the see that it’s coming.

In my Friday Notes edition #102, I shared my thoughts about my last four months without Twitter and how calm and quiet my digital life has become. I even wrote that I might ignore Bluesky. But that was last week.

Well, it didn’t take long to contradict myself! As you might have guessed, I’m now on Bluesky as @numericcitizen (of course), thanks to a generous donator of an invite link (looking at you @Maique).

Please make no mistake; it’s an experiment. I’m not planning to spend too much time on Bluesky, but I’m genuinely curious about its evolution and the traction it gets, if any.

I’m allowing myself to get on board for a simple reason: Manton from Micro.blog added support for cross-posting content to Bluesky. It didn’t take long. For me, it’s like getting a seal of approval from him. I highly value his opinion on Bluesky and the open web in general. So, I made the jump without really knowing what to do next except to enable the cross-posting of my content posted on MB.

Now, I wish Bluesky doesn’t get filled up with too many dark clouds. My fingers are crossed.

PS. I’m curious how Micro.blog will push that post onto the Bluesky universe. See you on the other side.

PPS. I’m gathering my thoughts and observations for an upcoming experiment status report. Stay tuned.

Today, I unexpectedly came across this announcement from Micro.blog: Highlights are now synced to Readwise.io, provided that you have an account with them and that you are on an Micro.blog Premium plan! How cool is that!

I immediately configured my Readwise.io connection in the Bookmarks section and exported past highlights in a CSV file. Next, I tried the feature on an article from MacRumors.

After a few minutes, I could read the archived version of the article and highlight some portions. And sure enough, my highlights were saved to Readwise.io in a snap.

The nice thing is that Inoreader also supports saving my highlights to Readwise.io. Everything going at the same place. Occasionally, I export and then import my highlights into Craft. Readwise remembers the point of my last export session.

I’ve been working on this for a while and now I feel it’s time to share with the world. Follow this link, then expand each question to read the answer. It was a lot of fun to put together.

This site is going to be updated as new micro-workflows are documented or tweaked. This document is now joining my Complete Content Creator Toolset.

If you have a question, feel free to ask, using the commenting feature of the website as shown below. I welcomed suggestions for workflow improvements too! Enjoy and I hope you learn a few things along the way or that it triggers some ideas for your own workflows!

After reading Gruber’s article about Wavelength, I decided to try it. I’m not sure I require another messaging solution. Besides using Apple’s iMessage and Telegram to get news from Ukraine, the rest of my messaging app usage is anecdotic.

So, what are my thoughts about this? The initial few moments with Wavelength are not what I call an honest onboarding experience. Well, I already shared my surprise at having to enter my phone number at the very first step of the application onboarding. I thought it was brutal. I was quickly reminded that asking for our phone number is the usual thing to ask in a messaging app. M’ok. 🤨 But hey, Wavelength is still in beta, right? So, let’s give them a break.

So I created a group called Microbloggers (invite link) for hosting people coming from Micro.blog (well, anyone with the link can join). As I’m writing this, there are 25 members. I’m surprised. I wasn’t expecting that many people to join. I guess my Micro.blog circle is made of very curious people. I love this. Is @Manton joining? Nope. But @Jean is among the participant, which I find cool!

My general feeling with the application is that its design reminds me of Micro.blog’s simplicity. Wavelength is simple but not simplistic. I love it very much. I’m using Wavelength mainly on the Mac, but also on the iPhone. I prefer the Mac experience. But, again, Wavelength is not complete. I’m looking forward to watching its future evolution.

An interesting byproduct of Wavelength is the inclusion of a ChatGPT client inside. It’s the group called “AI”. We can interact with it at any given time, even include this “guy” in a conversation within a group, using the @AI in a message. Each request to the AI entity is kept as an individual conversation (except the one occurring within a group conversation). It’s fun, valuable and fascinating at the same time.

But now, the big question: why would someone of Micro.blog starts using Wavelength and participates in a group chat? Conversations are already happening on Micro.blog. Just like on Micro.blog, if you are a member of a Wavelength group, conversations are public. I’m still pondering this. I understand people who are also wondering about the usefulness of having Wavelength alongside the Micro.blog. Maybe the instant nature of such messaging platform is something missing on Micro.blog? This is something I liked on Twitter: this ability to enter a private conversation with one of your followers.

Well, that’s it for now.

You can join the “Microbloggers” Wavelength group with this invite link. I plan to leave the group open as long as my experiment with Wavelength lasts.

One last thing: after launching the app for the first time, this wave animation is mesmerizing.

Another thing: my avatar photo is me at 5. 😊

Craft version 2.4.5 came out today after more than six weeks since the previous release. Usually, releases come out every two to three weeks. I guess people’s expectations were pretty high after having waited so long.

Not only did the update bring very limited functionality, it broke a seemingly simple gesture that was used by a majority of users, mostly on the iPhone. As you might expect, this caused plenty of pushbacks on this. My guess is that it took the Craft team by surprise. Moreover, a new navigation sidebar design is also causing a some more pushback.

There is a recurring theme on Slack that people are tired of waiting for basic fixes while receiving questionable features they don’t see useful in general, not only for them. It’s a bit of a public relation crisis. Now my question, could this crisis be prevented? My short answer is yes. I gave a longer answer in my recent YouTube video… “A Proposal for Handling Users Feedback Differently” and published an article too.

Craft is a young company. They have plenty of things to learn, and managing expectations is certainly one of them. Managing or at the very least communicating a clear roadmap is another. It’s not enough to publish an article once a year on the company’s blog. Such messages need repetitive reminders and on more than one platform. If they would rather not share a roadmap, then they should probably stop using Slack and Circle. Those are discussion platforms where feedback and feature requests are expressed, albeit in a chaotic way.

What I’m starting to find really troubling and worrisome is the lack of fixes to obvious issues affecting many users, me included. And we are talking about long-standing issues here. Slack is full of users expressing their resentment for unfixed problems. Sure we get answers like “we’re on it”, “will check this out, thanks for the report”, “bla bla bla”. Actions speak louder than words. For the first time since I’m using Craft, I’m starting to wonder if I should reconsider my posture with my dependency on Craft.

After Anybox earlier this week, now is the turn of TimeStory to make its debut on my list of apps under consideration. About TimeStory, from the application’s website:

TimeStory is a Mac app for illustrating events on a timeline, designed to help you easily create plans and roadmaps, capture history, tell stories, and more.

I spent quite some time today on a project at work using TimeStory. I’m blown away by the simplicity and the craftsmanship that went into this app. It’s very focused, which makes it easy to learn. At every step of my experimentation with the app, I was met with an evident interaction and response from TimeStory. I built something that took me a few hours instead of days in MS Project. Consider me impressed.

I’m on the seven-day free trial. I’ll probably buy the app for two reasons: it brought me real added value in my workflow, joy, and some rewards along the way. Also, I can see a few use cases in my personal numeric life, for my Apple Rumours hub, for example.

We need more apps like this. Very focused, not trying to impress with undeeded features. On the Mac only. Native: AppKit + Swift. No subscription.

Oh, and I love TimeStory’s About page. It’s always interesting to learn about the behind-the-scenes story of an app. I hope this app continues to evolve and improve for as long as possible.

For the first time today, I diligently tested Micro.blog’s bookmarking feature. I don’t know if this is a popular feature among MB users, but I wonder if I should find a place for MB bookmarks in my workflow. Let’s see a typical workflow.

So, I start reading an article from my now favourite RSS reader: Inoreader. I decide to open the source website and use the bookmarklet to save the page into MB bookmarks. After a few minutes, MB diligently created a readable article archive stripped of all the noise. Think of it as an MB version of Instapaper.

I open the newly created archive and start my reading. I find an interesting or very valuable passage that I select in the browser. MB shows a very gentle overlay titled “Highlight”. I click on it, and sure enough, the text gets highlighted. But that’s not all.

MB can display a list of all my highlights. If I find a highlight that I want to create a linkpost for, I simply click the “New post” button underneath it. And voilà, I can start writing my linkpost right there.

Moreover, MB offers a simple way to save a bookmark by entering the article’s URL into the provided field at the top of the “Bookmarks” section on the MB website. Very handy.

Bookmarks can be embedded in a blog post too. Just click “Embed” underneath a specific bookmark.

The only downside, for now, is the lack of data portability: bookmarks and highlights can’t be saved or exported outside MB.

The bookmarking feature is part of the Premium subscription tier.

👨‍💻 I’ve been extensively testing Inoreader recently and I have to say that as much as I like the service, I find the support for third-party services seriously lacking.

Inoreader supports many third-party services like Blogger, Telegram, Buffer, Evernote, LinkedIn, Hootsuite, Pocket, Google Drive, Instapaper, OneNote, Hatena Bookmarks and Dropbox.

It certainly a long list of services but the problem is that I don’t use any of them. I recently cancelled Buffer and Pocket. I’m surprised to see Blogger but not WordPress or Ghost. Who’s using Hootsuite these days?

I wish Raindrop.io or Notion would be supported, after all, both of these services support offer APIs. Too bad because with better integration often come more efficient workflows.

Building something around tags, IFTTT and RSS could unlock some form of automated workflow. For example, tagging an article would generate an article in a custom RSS feed built using Inoreader which would trigger an applet on IFTTT monitoring this RSS feed which in turn could create an entry in Things 3. The latter part is a challenge, though. IFTTT can’t talk to Things, but it can talk to Google Sheet.

Nothing is perfect I guess. 🤷🏻‍♂️

The pervasiveness of AI is starting to look troubling at best. This week as I was heading to my WordPress admin page, I got this message at the top.

Who knew? I was curious so I read the official “AI Engine” plugin page on WordPress.org. Here’s something that I found dubious.

Five stars reviews only so far. I won’t have the pleasure to test this plugin or implement any of this on my website as I’m getting ready to move out of WordPress this year. Now, who’s next, Ghost?

The official plugin page can be found here.

I’m heading to Micro.blog and start reading on my timeline, I read someone’s post about note taking apps, mentioning how Bear Notes is great. I switch to Bear Notes website. After watching the introduction video, I head to the website’s blog section. Bear Notes certainly looks great. This particular blog post looks at how Bear Notes can work with other apps like Things 3 and Readwise. I wonder how I could use Brea Notes for my workflow. I’m reminded that we can export Readwise highlights in markdown files. I head to Readwise website and give it a try. I play with the export options for a while and export all my highlights, more than 1400 in total. Easy and quick. Next I wonder if I could import them in Craft. Yes I can. What about importing them in Ulysses. Yes I could. Then I remember that Ulysses, my go-to writing app, is great. And forget about Bear Notes.

Written and posted using Ulysses on my M1 MacBook Air.

I’ve been a News Explorer RSS reader user for a long time. It’s a less-known RSS reader compared to Reeder or anything else. It’s really good, but missing a few things that keep bugging me. There is no web version, no filtering feature, and no text highlighting either.

I started testing Inoreader yesterday and Feedbin. Both seem good RSS readers, but none of them is satisfying. In fact, I’m never satisfied with anything when it comes to RSS readers and reading applications or services in general. It’s been going on forever.

Read-later apps are unsatisfying, too, for me. None of Instapaper, Pocket, Matter, and Readwise’s Reader satisfy my needs. Readwise is too busy and still immature, Matter is nice, but some things like tags handling don’t scale well.

The perfect combination of a read-later function with an RSS reader doesn’t exist. If I were twenty years younger, I would write my own.

I don’t know if anyone knows about this free web tool by Adobe: Enhance Voice (link), but it is really impressive (@MattBirchler knows about it). Here is what I’d like to do: find a way to integrate this tool into my video production workflow.

So, I’m producing YouTube videos with ScreenFlow (my YouTube Channel). So far, I’m ok with the results, but I think my voice, and the sound in general, could be improved (I’m using the Blue Yeti Microphone, but Adobe Enhance Voice is really impressive).

So, how can I:

1. Do my recording sessions as usual
2. Do my video montage as usual
3. Extract the audio track
4. Use Adobe Enhance Voice to re-process the audio track
5. Replace the audio track in my Screenflow document
6. Export the final video

Step 3 and 5 are not possible in the current release of Screenflow. Any suggestion of tools I could use instead?

Here’s what I know or already use:

• Permute allows for easy conversion of audio files, including converting video files into the audio-only version.
• QuickTime Player can export the audio track only out of a video file.
• I know how to use iMovie.
• I’m a happy user of Audio Hijack
• I don’t really want to get rid of Screenflow. LumaFusion, FinalCut Pro, etc., maybe could do the job here, but it would be ok if I could find a simple utility that can replace the audio track easily instead.

This question has been posted to the Screenflow Telestream forum.

Update #1: corrected a few typos but added the solution using iMovie. Here’s the solution.

1. Do my recording sessions as usual
2. Do my video montage as usual and export the video
3. Extract the audio track using Permute in .MP3 format
4. Use Adobe Enhance Voice to re-process the audio track
5. Convert .WAV into .MP3
6. Launch iMovie and create a new Project
7. Import the produced video in step 2
8. Detach the audio track and delete it
9. Add the enhanced version of the audio track
10. Export the final video using iMovie’s share option

Voilà!

Update #2: there is a major issue with this process, the video and audio are not in sync over time, even though both files are of the same duration. This is not something easy to fix. Back to the drawing board. 😒

This video from birchtree@mastodon.social resonated greatly with me today. Here’s why.

First, someone is finally calling out something about software subscriptions that I always wanted to call out myself. Every developer seems entitled to charge a subscription for whatever reason. Matt brilliantly illustrates that some subscriptions are ok, some are borderline ok, but others are not.

For applications like Notion or Craft, developers must pay costs for hosting the backend. For example, Craft’s backend seems to be on the AWS cloud. In that specific case, it’s clear that a subscription makes sense. So we must help the developers pay their bills, right?

Things get more controversial when the developers charge for a subscription, even though no backend services are required. Why would the developers go with a subscription model, then, you might ask? Well, this is where I want to chime in. The developers may not have to pay hosting costs, but what about their development time? It is as if we value infrastructure costs more than craftmanship time. It should not be this way.

I’m willing to pay for software or service using a subscription if the product comes with updates regularly. Matt has shown Tweetbot as an example. Well, this isn’t the best example because Tweetbot rarely gets any updates; it doesn’t fit my criteria for using a subscription. CleanShot X, absolutely yes. I recognize, through my subscription, not only the value of the service but the time it took to put it together and keep it running fine. I’m willing to support the developer for that through a subscription.

We pay 5$ for a drink that takes less than a minute to prepare at Starbucks. Why is it so hard to pay for developers' time, spending weeks or months writing great software? Also, we must try to consider not only backend bills when deciding that a subscription is ok; craftmanship is something to pay for too.

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.

I read about so many people flocking to Mastodon, leaving Twitter behind. I actually started to see a definitive decline in my followers number. Something is really going on. I myself started to think about the possibility of leaving the platform too. Just like I did with Facebook, Flickr, and Tumblr, only to leave a place where my content is simply cross-posted from another source without a real and active presence of mine. Twitter could be next. Really. I could live without the traffic influx from Twitter, which represents about 15% of all my visitors.

There is one thing that it would be hard for me to leave behind, though. If it wasn’t about the war in Ukraine, it would be an easy decision. The problem is that I follow a few people and news sources that diffuse their content on Twitter. Is there a Twitter equivalent for this type of small blips of nano content? I don’t see that in Mastodon yet. RSS feeds are not a platform but transport. The next Twitter has yet to emerge.

A recent post from MereCivilian about subscribing to a fast Internet service triggered this one. Here are a few reasons for having fast Internet at home:

1. You’re many people (four or more) living under the same roof who are active Internet users;
2. You’re many users who are doing streaming at the same time;
3. You’re downloading or uploading really big files all the time;
4. You’re playing online games;

Other than that, high-speed internet is useless as each micro-transaction (small HTTPS requests) won’t benefit from the bandwidth available. In other words, a 100K web page on a 100 Mbits or 400 Mbits or 1000 Mbits link will take about the same time to load and render within your browser. Finally, consider the DNS service, which plays a big role in the latency involved while browsing the Internet.

I recently came back from a one-week vacation in Cancun, Mexico. The first thing I did before leaving the airport to go home was to call an Uber taxi. My last experience with Uber went well, but it was quite a while. Boy, this time it was a surprising and unexpected experience. After ordering the car, I was met with a plethora of notifications and ads within the application and via Uber Eat to order food on the go or before arriving at home. Those ads took the form of notifications, but also big popups taking the whole screen within the application. It was so intrusive, it wasn’t always clear how to dismiss the ad to return to the actual trip details.

I understand the idea of integrating two different services from the same company, but doing so at the expense of a great user experience with the basic feature of the application is not the way to go with me. Even Apple sometimes seems to be going in that direction. Not good.

If you own a desktop Mac, you probably use an external drive for Time Machine. If you use a portable Mac, most likely not, and according to the Tidbits article, you’re not alone. The portability of the Mac is hindered by having an external drive hooked permanently. I, personally, have a different strategy: I use a Synology NAS DS720+ with Time Machine enabled to do my backups over the wireless network. It works perfectly, but I don’t do a full backup of my MacBook Air. Files that are part of iCloud Drive are excluded (read more here, you’ll find out why it’s a good idea). In fact, most of the files are excluded, except a few critical folders, outside the scope of any cloud syncing services. Applications aren’t backed up either (easy to recover in case of lost). Backups are small but are just what I need to protect my work.

Why is Carrot Weather so popular? I’m a weather enthusiast and I like trying new weather-related applications. I use many all year long, but Carrot Weather is not part of my application arsenal. They recently introduced updated weather maps, but to get a sense of them, I would need to subscribe for a year subscription. Most of the interesting features are available in the premium tier. I like the maps feature, but I wonder how better they will get compared to the ones that I’m already using in MyRadar. iOS 15 brought a significant update to the weather too, but I find the maps lacking radar resolution.

If there are users of Carrot Weather subscription, tell me more, tell my why it is so nice?

Well, well, well, it seems that data portability among CMS is an issue. Who knew! I’m trying to find an easy way to move a few posts from my WordPress blog into my Ghost website. Exporting data from WordPress seems like an all-or-nothing situation. There are a few plugins available for this. The problem is that the content isn’t easily imported into Ghost. The latter does have a plugin, but it doesn’t support selecting posts. I don’t want to do this manually.

Any idea or suggestions?

Update 2022-02-16: There is a follow-up to my quest, read all the details here

I think it’s worth it and it’s important. The transaction was easy (Apple Pay), which makes a big difference. Consider this an impulsive buy.

So, as expected, yesterday Micro.blog introduced support for newsletters in the premium subscription tier. The official announcement follows:

Today we’re announcing a major new feature for Micro.blog Premium subscribers: email newsletters. Micro.blog can now manage, letting readers subscribe to your blog and receive emails for new blog posts. It’s deeply integrated into Micro.blog and works great for collecting multiple microblog posts together automatically.

Here is why I upgraded my subscription plan almost instantly after the news came out.

First, I’m a big fan of Micro.blog as a publishing platform and also of its foundational principles. I’m totally ok with paying a monthly fee of $10 to support the team behind—I want the platform to thrive. Second, adding support for newsletters is a great idea. Not everyone is using an RSS feed reader or like to read content through a browser. Everyone uses email clients! It’s important to provide different ways of communicating content to the readers. Newsletters are making a comeback.

Enabling newsletter is dead simple as shown below. I chose the weekly newsletter containing all the posts for the past week. Email go out at 9AM, local time, each Saturday morning. It’s a good way to start the weekend, isn’t it?

As you can see, the settings are quite simple. There is no formatting option (yet). Having a choice between all text vs excerpt would be a useful one. Speaking of formatting, one thing that I’m curious about, though: how does one newsletter look like? I couldn’t find an example in the documentation. Furthermore, how can we preview the next newsletter issue? It seems that, in case the first option is selected (one email for each post), the author has 30 minutes after posting to preview the email as explained here:

@timapple The preview works the same for the weekly and monthly option except it only creates it 30 minutes before it’s ready to send. Micro.blog will send you a preview email automatically with a link to edit it then. — Manton Reece https://micro.blog/manton/12238527

How does Micro.blog newsletter feature fit in my workflow? Micro.blog newsletter joins two other services that I depend on: Mailbrew to create something very similar in nature to Micro.blog offering and Ghost for my monthly newsletter (previously on Substack). On Mailbrew though, my summary newsletter also brings in content published on other platforms (WordPress, Blot, Ghost, Smugmug, etc.). It’s the ultimate weekly posts summary newsletter. Ghost, for my introspection newsletter, is like Substack, but better. I see Micro.blog offering as being a convenient way for my readers to get my content into their mailbox. It won’t replace Mailbrew or Ghost, obviously.

By subscribing to the premium tier, I also get a few goodies that could prove to be useful: bookmarking archiving and highlighting. The former allows for the bookmarking of a post on my timeline. The latter allows me to highlight some text while reading a bookmarked post or URL. Highlighted text can be conveniently used to create a link post easily. One thing that I would love to see is a browser extension for selecting text in any website. I’m not holding my breath, though.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with this addition to an already great service for content creators like me. Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to the weekly digest! So, to those who subscribe, I guess this post is the first to get through the newsletter feature of Micro.blog!

Don’t miss the YouTube video explaining the feature.

Apparently, it looks like tomorrow, Micro.blog is going to add support for newsletters. A few weeks ago, I can’t remember exactly, Manton posted a screenshot (which I can no longer find) where a “newsletter” item was shown on the left sidebar on the Micro.blog main site.

I’m very curious about Micro.blog take on newsletter. Micro.blog is all about simplicity without being too simplistic. If the feature is available to entry-level paid tier, I’m might enable it and use it myself. Right now, I’m using Mailbrew to gather all my published posts via the RSS feed to generate a newsletter. There is one thing though, are we starting to feel a bit of newsletters fatigue?

Can’t wait for tomorrow.

Boooooo… Well, it looks like I changed my mind. I didn’t remember that I wrote this blog post following the release of Ghost 4.0. At the time, I didn’t see the benefit, but now, it’s quite another story. I really love Ghost and I think I made the right choice for a few significant reasons:

1. Ghost comes with APIs, which enable all sort of possibilities to improve my workflow.
2. Ghost editor is much more powerful than Substack’s. This week, they started to release new cards type: GIF and Button. They promise another ten before Christmas! Yeah!
3. I prefer Ghost’s design in general over Substack.

In case you didn’t know, my newsletter website is reachable here: https://numericcitizen-introspection.blog

Timery received a major addition in this week’s update: REPORTS! As I wrote recently, I’m tracking the time I spend on my blogging and content creation activities. Timery is my go-to client for Toggl, a time tracking service. Having access to reports within the application, instead of heading to the Toogl’s website is really helpful. Now, looking forward for Timery to support macOS Monterey’s Shortcuts!

In a recent announcement by Readwise.io:

We’re now in position to reimagine aspects of the digital reading experience itself, from how you annotate a document, to how you navigate. Readwise as you know it today isn’t going anywhere, but this is our future.

And:

With the new Readwise reading app, not only will these resurfacing and syncing features not go away, they will be enhanced through tight integration into the reading experience.

There is much more to digest on their published essay. They’ve been thinking about this for a while and judging from a few screenshots, their reading app seems compelling and well done. I’m hoping they will support Safari’s extensions. RSS feeds will be supported too. Sadly, it will probably be another Electron-based app. We’ll see if this doesn’t affect too much the experience.

I’ve been a subscriber of Readwise.io for a while, but I must admit that I’m not taking advantage of it as much as I would have liked. It does get synced with my Pocket account, but that’s about it. Oh, and my saved quotes get resurfaced in my Mailbrew summary newsletter, which is cool.

I’ve subscribed to their private beta testers waiting list and I can’t wait to try it out. If all goes well and is up to what they say on their blog post, this could entirely replace Pocket for me.

I recently noted that I’m spending much more time on Mailbrew website for my newsletters reading rather than in HEY Feed. Why is that? Well, I think there are a few sticky features in Mailbrew that helps me better process information tidbits. First, the reading experience is great. The “Read” button next to a URL will bring a nicely formatted version of an article from a URL. Second, A “save” button is handily available for me to use if I want to keep a piece of information for later use. My collection of saved items is growing by the day. There’s also the Save to Mailbrew bookmarklet that comes handy. The website on the iPad is also a joyful experience.

Mailbrew update schedule is pretty fast and brings many small improvements on a constant flow. Now, if only there was a highlighting feature it would make Mailbrew reading experience a perfect fit for my workflow.

By the way, thanks to Mailbrew, you can get a weekly summary of all my publications here.

They flipped the switch to ON. HEY World is LIVE! I’m so glad, curious and already excited to use this other channel to share my written content with the world. I’m already thinking about my first post on this new platform. Furthermore, I think this addition brings even more value to an already useful service, on which I depend every single day. Recently, I asked: How many websites can a blogger have? Well, as soon as a newcomer doesn’t add too much friction when publishing content, it’s ok to have many. HEY World seems to be such a service. Count me in.

I recently published a long piece about transforming your Twitter experience by using Twitter lists instead of following a bunch of accounts. As noted in the article, one side effect of this approach is that services that look for your Twitter account’s list of people you follow won’t really work. That’s the case for a new service called “Spoonbill”.

Keep updated on your friends' and family members' bios, websites, locations, and names.

Spoonbill will send you a summary of changes that occurred on Twitter’s bio of people you follow. I wonder if this service can be tweaked to use Twitter’s lists instead. What about Mailbrew, maybe they could come up with a similar feature, which would be really cool.

In the meantime, I’m not coming back to following two thousands people.