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 ?

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.

Reflects on my journaling habits at work and personally, questioning the purpose of writing when I seldom revisit the content. Continue reading →

After skipping a week, here is the latest edition of the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter. This edition is the one shared from Craft as a published document. The Ghost web-hosted version is coming later today.

I’m not too fond of text quotes shared as beautiful pictures (coming from Readwise, for example), especially if they don’t come with ALT text description. They look pretty, though. Here’s an example. I don’t like them because they hinder content indexing in some ways.

In my latest edition of The Ephemeral Scrapbook: “Got a keyboard. I took a break because of work. I’m skipping DeepSeek. The iPhone 16 Pro Max vs Samsung Galaxy 25 Ultra. Who wins? Marking the start of a dark era.”

Today, I decided to let go a few writing ideas from my “idea pipeline.” I realized that sometimes, the words we choose not to write are just as significant as the ones we do.

Or, Instead of All This—

No one will ever control our own identities on third-party platforms. You relinquish control over your identity when you choose to present yourself on one of these platforms. You can be rate-limited for posting too much. You can be suspended by a bot that determines your behavior is bot-like. The platform can pivot at any time from one thing to another. The entire platform could shut down. You have no control, and jumping from one to another will only mean that you have to do it all again later.

Or, instead of all this, you could learn how to make a damn website.

But, asking for my wife here¹, once you’ve got your little HTML island right in the middle of the digital ocean, how do you get noticed? How do you build a business, even the smallest one, from this island?

I initially thought Micro.one would be a suitable platform for my new French blog, but after spending the entire weekend experimenting with it, I’ve already realized that I miss two essential features from the full Micro.blog experience: personal notes and support for newsletters. 🤦🏻‍♂️

“Blogging or not? A game caught my attention. A personal letter to Zuck. I like poems. Pixelfed, Pixelfed, Pixelfed! Apple is clever about Severance. I bought a keyboard. And so much more.” - The Ephemeral Scrapbook — Edition 2025-02 is out! The email version coming later today.

Me: “My new French blog is nearly ready to go live. Will you read it?" Her: “Well, yeah, sure, but how will I know there is something new to read?" Me: “Well, you just have to go to the website, just like you read the news." Her: “Mmm, but it’s not the same. I have to remember the website’s address. Can you send notifications instead?" Me: “Well, I’m not sure this would fit the idea of a blog, but you just need to save it as a bookmark. Continue reading →

Today, I think I finally found a real use case for Micro.one. I bought my domain and set up my account. It was rather quick and easy. If I had let Micro.one set up my domain name for me, it would have been even easier. I think the ingredients of Micro.one are all there for an accessible solution for those who want to get out of Meta or other silos and start owning their little space on the web, free of tracking, free of ads, and built on open software technologies. Continue reading →

Medium seems to suffer from another problem: AI-generated content and fake account for fake engagement to generate revenues. According to their recent article (Paywall might be enforced to read this), many accounts under the Partner Program were suspended recently to stop this fraud. I’ve returned to Medium last fall (read my comments about the reading and writing experience over there) and found that content quality has gone down compared to what we used to read there. Continue reading →

The first edition of 2025 of the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter is out. I’m curious if some of you look into these. Let me know.

I have twice as many followers on Bluesky than on Mastodon. Don’t know how many followers on Micro.blog… because… Micro.blog. 🙃

I love this panel that Ghost presents after hitting “Publish and share”. That was the last edition for 2024.

Now I feel bad about this. 😔

I still have three more articles to publish before the end of the year: one about Medium, the final edition of the Ephemeral Scrapbook, and a review of my creative year.

Manuel Moreale link posting on the subject of header images on blog posts: “I’ll go one step further Nelson, I have a growing hatred towards pointless images in blog posts in general, I don’t even care if they’re AI-generated or not. If they’re there as part of the content then by all means use them but if you’re just adding a stock image from unsplash to make the page “feel” more interesting then you’re just part of the broader problem that’s plaguing the web. Continue reading →

Meta blog post – Manu

I am not the biggest fan of meta blog posts, also called blogging about blogging. I do think they’re sometimes useful but they’re also quite uninspiring for me to read. And that’s why I try to stay away from the topic for the most part.

I find this statement surprising coming from the author behind the popular “People & Blog” series. Maybe I’m missing something here.