Trying to Define What is a Blog Home

This might be obvious for many bloggers, but these questions popped up in my mind this morning when working to enable the new visual design of my blog.

What is a blog’s home? Or is it defined? Should it be the geographical region where the blog is hosted? Or should it be the author’s regional location? Or should the author sign with his or her name followed by both, like “Numeric Citizen from Montréal, Canada, hosted on a server somewhere in the US”? And where this signature should go? At the end of each post? Or at the end of the blog’s main page?

I’m still pondering my options.

Dominik Schwind:

If you don’t have one yet, go start a personal website! Don’t take it too seriously, try things and it can be a nice, meditative hobby and helps against the urge to doomscroll. Also you might never know, your kind of people might find it and connect with you.

I give this advice from time to time, and generally people’s reactions are: 🤨🤔🤷🏻‍♂️.

Everyone will respond: “but how do you get discovered so people can read and like your posts?”. To which my reaction is: 🤦🏻‍♂️

Launching Numeric Citizen Blog Digests

Today, I’m excited to share my latest idea and creation: a website collecting my Micro.blog posts, monthly digests. What, another website? Yup.

In case you didn’t know, Micro.blog has a newsletter capability. My blog offers readers the opportunity to subscribe to a monthly blog post digest delivered to their inboxes. Plus, each digest is also available as a webpage (here’s the index page if you are curious). It’s a great way to get a quick overview of everything I published for a specific month. Of course, the whole thing is searchable.

But one day, I tried feeding one digest into ChatGPT and started asking questions about it. It was a revelation. Eventually, I asked for a structured summary, and ChatGPT promptly complied, returning a beautifully formatted summary. I spent quite some time reading the output, and I was blown away by how accurate and complete it was. This is where the idea of creating a new website to store and share those summarized digests. I think it’s a great way to get up to speed with my blog for newcomers or for people who might have missed a few months.

So, here we are, digests.numericcitizen.me is born. For now, you’ll find the summary of last month, but each month will be added as a single article. An AI-generated summary (by Micro.blog) describes the current month, and you need to click the title to get all the content. I plan to add some other highlights to this site. Stay tuned and enjoy.

“Start a blog. Start one because the practice of writing at length, for an audience you respect, about things that matter to you, is itself valuable. Start one because owning your own platform is a form of independence that becomes more important as centralized platforms become less trustworthy. Start one because the format shapes the thought, and this format is good for thinking.” - JA Westenberg in The Case for Blogging in the Ruins

Beyond feeling independent, having a blog helps active thinking.

Let's Start 2026!

This is my first post of the year on Micro.blog. Despite the overall global, political, and economic challenges that don’t seem very promising, I am personally looking forward to 2026.

Travel-wise, I have four planned: Egypt, Mexico, France & Thailand. This could also be a productive year for photography. I’m looking forward to those trips as we celebrate our 20-year relationship, my wife and I. 😊

Tech-wise, it’s the year of the iPhone upgrade. After skipping the iPhone 16 and iPhone 17, it’s time to upgrade my capable but aging iPhone 15 Pro Max. I expect to stay on the Max. It could also be the year when I replace my M2 MacBook Air with the M5 version. It will depend on the available money and other factors. Lastly, if Apple finally release a HomePod with a screen, I might get one, too. 💻

I wish you a good one!

I’m trying something new this year for my year-in-review blog post. Using all my monthly post digests stored in Craft1, I’m using ChatGPT to look at those digests, take into account last year’s year-in-review article, plus this year’s document personal milestones to suggest ideas. This is now possible because Craft now supports MCP. Using the best ChatGPT models, I get a lot of material to consider but somehow I feel this is really overwhelming. I should be more directive like limiting the number of possible scenarios, their length, etc. I’m still exploring this workflow.

  1. I subscribe to my own blog post digest newsletter for archival purposed. ↩︎

Rant on. I’m judging on facts and acts, not with what someone says. Some people might defend web openness et al, but sharing on x.com in 2025 because it’s the place most people go is not an act of openness. It’s an act of contribution toward fascism. Stop pretending, people, don’t be lazy, stop taking shortcuts and leave x.com once and for all. Rant off.

Algorithms, Platforms, and the Personal Web Space

The piece) from Disassociated about being “freed from personal websites” thanks to algorithms and timelines really resonated with me. I’ve long believed that platforms are killing the web; they are not the web.

I recently asked my son if he had ever considered having his own personal website—a blog, having a place outside the usual platforms. His immediate response was, “But what about discoverability?” Why I think that everything comes down to that: It’s always about beating the algorithms (hello SEO) so that we are “discovered”. I always believed about my own existence without the need of any algorithm. Same with my wife: she knows about my websites but rarely visit them. She’s always talking about discoverability too, thinking that there is no future if I’m not one those platforms. She couldn’t be more wrong. And yet… Platforms have obscured the open web, plain and simple.

This led me to a question that keeps circling in my mind: if we go back 50 years, how accurately did newspapers reflect reality? And how different is our situation today? Yes, the speed and reach of information are radically different now, but consider people who read only one newspaper—like my father did when I was young. Weren’t they also shaped, if not manipulated, by that publication’s editorial line?

Disclaimer: I feel my feelings are well reflected in those few words… it’s complicated.