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I began my writing project for the Apple Journal review. For this project, I will try a different approach1. I started experimenting with the Perplexity Comet browser to survey past reviews. I use genAI to create quick summaries of previous articles. I save text highlights in Inoreader for the most interesting past reviews. I use Craft to compile all my knowledge and copy-paste the genAI summaries. However, I’m unsure where this will lead.
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Dare I say ‘modern approach’? ↩︎
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As a blogger and someone curious about many topics, I often feel I miss opportunities to become an expert in certain fields. Generative AI is one example. It gained public attention in the fall of 2022. At that time, when generative AI started to gather attention in the public, I should have recognized this important moment. I should have taken the chance to gather knowledge and organize it like a true researcher. I’m very analytical in general. I ask good questions. I have the tools and the motivation to do this work. Now, it feels overwhelming to catch up.
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I began to unpublish several posts from numericcitizen.me, mainly those imported from Substack. It’s fascinating how quickly content can become irrelevant in our rapidly changing world.
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I see a big increase in subscribers to my blog on Ghost since Ghost 6 was released this week. I don’t know if that will last, but hey, I’ll take it!
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I wrote these articles on Medium under the Numeric Citizen Journey in the last year and I wonder how different my readership would have been if I wrote these articles on Substack. Substack isn’t having a great time these days…
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Bye Bye (Again) Medium
My Medium membership is up for renewal on August 17th. I returned to Medium last year to share a special set of articles about my potential career pivot to freelancing. I wrote over a dozen articles on this topic, believing Medium was a suitable platform for personal and career-focused content. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Despite following all the SEO tricks, I earned only $1.64 in revenue, which I won’t receive since the minimum payout is $10. 😳 I expected my earnings to at least cover the cost of my Medium membership, but that didn’t happen. I also intended to read more content on the platform, but I didn’t. I thought I would gain more followers, but that didn’t occur either. I understand now that I need to move on1, 2.
Goodbye, Medium. It was one of my numerous experiments3. I’ll keep my account active but won’t write or share anything further.
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Referring to an earlier post today, I think I know why I’m publishing less often long articles. Building each newsletter edition takes quite some time and is rather disruptive-I’m constantly on the lookout to find new and interesting stuff to put into each ephemeral scrapbook. Learning to use Elements proved to be more demanding that I thought (but it was worth it!). And more recently, maintaining my visual catalog of Liquid Glass failures also requires some dedication, thank you, Apple.
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It has been a long time since I published a long article on numericcitizen.me. Aside from my newsletter, in-depth articles have become rare. It seems that I am only able to produce short texts. Should I be worried about that?
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I just discovered that you can have more than one newsletter on Ghost. Maybe I could use it to restart my Photo Legend Series?
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I wonder what’s going on with Daniel Eran Dilger. It’s been close to five years without posting on his blog: Roughly Drafted. His Twitter account is now private. Nothing to see on LinkedIn either. 🧐
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Micro.blog Question Challenge
Jim Mitchell, on his blog:
As is customary after posting my own, I’m extending the challenge to Numeric Citizen (@numericcitizen) and David Johnson (@crossingthethreshold) to answer the same questions:
Here are my answers!
- Why did you start a blog in the first place? It was when Apple had iWeb, part of MobileMe. It was a family thing only. iWeb died, so did my blog. Eventually, I returned to blogging on Blogger, now part of Google, while developing iPhone apps in 2009. It lasted until 2013. Then it all died. I returned to blogging in 2015, using WordPress, then migrated to Ghost and Micro.blog; both serve different purposes. The rest is history.
- Have you blogged on other platforms before? Yes, all in all, I experimented with iWeb, Blogger, WordPress, Micro.blog, Write.as, Substack, Medium. Am I missing one? Oh yeah, Scribble.pages! Sorry, Vincent!
- Why did you choose Micro.blog? Back in 2018, when it launched. Initially, I wasn’t sure about it and viewed it as an experiment (I shared some thoughts about this). I went all in during COVID. Couldn’t be happier.
- Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another application? It depends. Most of the time, I wrote on the web editor, but with recent updates to the Mac app, I do it more and more on the Mac app. Oh, MarsEdit is also one app that I use, from time to time.
- When do you feel most inspired to write? All the time, mainly in the mornings when my head is still pristine (can’t tell if this is something we can write!)
- Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? Most of the time, I write and then publish, especially on Micro.blog. For longer posts, I let it simmer for a while.
- What’s your favorite post on your blog? So hard to tell because what I write is so short. The whole thing is what I’m most proud of: having the time and the gut to think and write about anything away from big platforms, it’s something to be proud of IMO.
- Any future plans for your blog? Since last year, I decided to focus more on what I already have. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. So, Micro.blog forever! For now. I recently launched “Who Is Numeric Citizen?” website with the idea to replace another website built using Craft. 🤭
Thanks for calling me out on that, @jimmitchell ! How about @abc ? Will he catch the call?
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Is this a plain website? Is this a digital garden? Is this a landing page? No, it’s "Who Is Numeric Citizen?" A newly launched personal landing page where you can learn about him and his creative journey. Learn all the details (what, why, how) by visiting the website! I’ll meet you there.
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Thinking Outside
Thinking right now: people love to consume content the closest to their platform of choice. People on Substack wants to consume content over there, people on Medium, the same, on Medium. That’s why the idea of manually cross-posting my newsletter to Substack often comes back haunting me. This newsletter is currently only available from Ghost (and RSS + email, of course).
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I had plenty of time this weekend, but I must admit that I didn’t accomplish much of what I intended to work on. Sigh. 😒
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From time to time, while scrolling through my Micro.blog timeline, I’ll pause, read a particular post, peak at someone’s profile and previous posts, remember that this guy exists and wonder why in the first place I was following him or her. Then I sometimes hit the unfollow. Why do I think this is some sort of failure ?
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Doing some clean up in my RSS feeds where many feeds stopped working in the last 2–3 years. Of all of those who stopped blogging, I wonder why and what are they doing now.
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Musing About Journaling Goals
I maintain a daily journal at work where I jot down the day’s highlights. I write about what went well, the current challenges I’m facing, and any opportunities to do something different. I also note the clients I spoke to and the reasons behind it. I’ve been doing this for a while now, but I never refer to the journal once it’s written. It’s just a dump of my thoughts.
I wonder why I’m doing this. I think the act of writing it down is the ultimate goal, not the end results. It’s the same with my personal journal. I rarely write in it, but I do occasionally. I rarely, if ever, refer to it. Why is that?
Now, let’s talk about blogging. Why is all that? Is there a pattern here?
