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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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Who’s reading or paying attention to the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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?
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For real, i had a serious debate about all this today with her. ↩︎
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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. 🤦🏻♂️
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“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.
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Dear, Will You Read My Blog?
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. Also, I can show you a great RSS reader?"
Her: “🤔”
Me: “It’s an app where you can read blog posts. There are many great ones for your iPhone or iPad."
Her: “Well, yeah, but I must remember to open it just to see if something is new?"
Me: “Yes, exactly, just like when you open up your favourite news website or when you just tap on the Facebook icon on your iPad…"
Her: “🤨”
Me: “If there was a weekly newsletter, would it be ok for you to read it?"
Her: “That would be better, for sure, but… you know… I already get so many emails!"
Me: “M’ok, but my hosting service doesn’t provide a newsletter feature. Maybe I could just tell you: there is something new on my blog that you might find interesting because I wrote a story about you."
Her: “👩🏻💻”
The challenges a blogger may face can be unpredictable.
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Micro.one is the seed for something bigger
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. Of course, Micro.one isn’t the only service of its kind. But it does offer the right feature set to be an open and federated web citizen.
I feel an overwhelming desire to explore and savor this type of web content even further. I believe that sharing my passion for this subject matter could potentially ignite a similar level of enthusiasm in those around me. Even if it doesn’t, if people are genuinely curious enough to inquire about the reasons behind my enthusiasm, it’s a positive development, potentially marking the beginning of something more substantial. After all, who knows what the future holds?
I’ll share more in the near future.
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The Medium Mirage
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. The revenue program is much less generous than it used to be. I published 18 stories since my return and earned less than a dollar! We don’t know how these revenues are calculated, but it is a bit insulting or at least discouraging. At this rate, I won’t recover the Partner Program subscription cost in the first year which makes my presence there questionable. This should have been a no-cost journey which it’s not. Still seven months to go…
