Blogging

February 28, 2021 7:24am

Numeric Citizen

Today, I would like to do a quick poll among my blogger / writer friends here on Micro.blog. How did the pandemic influence your writing habits? Do you write more? Less? What could be the reasons behind the change of habit? To help you out and start the thread, I’ll answer to my own poll. The pandemic brought me closer to be what we call “a writer”. I write a lot more. Continue reading →

February 27, 2021 10:12am

Numeric Citizen

This is what I call a VERY productive Saturday.: three articles published (on Medium, on Numeric Citizen I/O, and on my Numeric Citizen Blog) and a monthly newsletter went out! 😎 Time for a break. 🏃Oh, and thank you for reading my stuff! 🙏🏻

February 25, 2021 6:58pm

Numeric Citizen

Today, I tested HEY World. This is my non-review. It could have worked great, but it’s not ready yet. One could say “Nice try, buddy”. I love their response to my test message. One thing stands out from their response, though: “For now, HEY World is just an experiment. … “Assuming there’s demand, we’ll begin opening it up for more people soon. And then, hopefully, for all HEY for You customers. Continue reading →

February 25, 2021 6:36pm

Numeric Citizen

After reading “Ghost on the iPad, a Review” from Tablet Habit, I tried to remember my experience when I tried the service myself. It wasn’t a good one for the thing I wanted to do with it: create a photography-oriented blog. In recent days, it seems that the “Ghost” name is gaining traction in the blogging arena. I have to wonder if Ghost is better at this than what I experienced for photography. Continue reading →

February 25, 2021 7:02am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Numeric Citizen

How many websites a blogger can have? Good question. I do have (too?) many, each filling their own niche. On that subject, something caught my attention yesterday in the public announcement of HEY’s experiment: “Hello, World!”. Jason Fried explaining why he never had a blog: “It was primarily because setting up a personal blog was just too much of a hassle. It felt formal, it required yet another tool, yet another place to write, yet another platform to pay for just one feature. Continue reading →

February 24, 2021 8:35pm

Numeric Citizen

Indeed.

Writing is fun.

February 23, 2021 5:43pm

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Numeric Citizen

Each day, it seems there is always something new happening in the world of newsletters. When it’s not someone famous who joins Substack, a company out of nowhere offers a brilliant idea built around supporting newsletters in one way or the other. I’m thinking of Hey in particular. “Email is the internet’s oldest instant self-publishing platform. Except you have to define a small audience every time you write. But what if you didn’t? Continue reading →

February 21, 2021 4:33pm

Numeric Citizen

In the last few months, on Twitter and on Micro.blog, I’ve been witnessing something that takes the shape of a small phenomenon: people are moving from one place to another in the digital space. Many are writing about their experience of moving from one hosting site to another. Some are leaving WordPress to return to Ghost. Others are proudly putting together their hosting solutions. The same happens in the newsletters hosting space: people are leaving Mailchimp to go to Substack or Revue. Continue reading →

February 21, 2021 8:13am

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Numeric Citizen

So I started another experiment involving Blot.im. For those who don’t know Blot.im, it is a static web site generator that seems popular among the crowd here. On paper, the process of publishing is very simple: you drag and drop files on a specific folder on your computer and they get instantly published on the web. Sound great, right? That’s what I thought. My goal with Blot.im is to do some “meta blogging”; a place where I could write about the tools, services and my blogger workflow. Continue reading →

February 20, 2021 8:28am

Numeric Citizen

I’m still new to the Indieweb world. Today, I’m learning about webmentions. I like the idea of linking reactions back to the origin. So, after enabling a plugin on my main blog, I’m trying to link back to one of my recent post and see what happens. One day, I wrote “The Journey is the Reward”. I don’t post personal things very often. Thanks for your feedback. Continue reading →

February 19, 2021 7:09am

Numeric Citizen

I’m in love with Micro.blog. It’s simple, not too busy. Based on open web standards. But today, I’m a bit frustrated with the bad sad of being too simple. My most important grievance is the lack of design flexibility. Built-in themes are too basics and unappealing. You have to be a HTML and CSS expert to try to figure out how to make simple tweaks. This frustration is behind my recent desire to look elsewhere for hosting the whole thing. Continue reading →

February 18, 2021 7:22am

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Numeric Citizen

It all started with the idea of tweaking my micro.blog visual theme. I don’t like it, but this is the best that I could find from the included themes. After reading for a while and seeing people writing about their blogger workflow, I found out that Micro.blog is using Hugo, a static website generator. Then I started to learn about Hugo by searching for introduction videos on YouTube. Then, I learned about Hugo themes and how they are constructed, and at the center of how a website is displayed. Continue reading →

February 17, 2021 7:17am

Numeric Citizen

Thought of the day for @manton and @jean: there is something that could be improved regarding micro.blog: opening up the evolution and improvement roadmap of the platform. I do appreciate when a service do put out their roadmaps so the community get a better look at where things will be going in the future. Mailbrew, Plausible and Craft are very vocal about their future plans, you just have to find the place where they talk about it. Continue reading →

February 16, 2021 7:47am

Numeric Citizen

Hey @jack! Let’s start a discussion.😊 I’m looking at your sites, your work and the tools and services you use. I’m very curious about how it all fit together. I’m curious about this Hugo thing, Github as a storage service and content editors and how they all talk to each other. Maybe others would be interested to discuss their options and workflow too. Chime in!

Let’s start like this: I started to look closely at Hugo and now I do have a better idea of this engine. What is less clear is this. Suppose I’m running an instance of Hugo on my M1-based Mac mini. Where does Github fit? Why I would use it?

February 9, 2021 1:08pm

Numeric Citizen

Writing, like so many creative acts, is hard. Sitting there, staring, mad at yourself, mad at the material because it doesn’t seem good enough and you don’t seem good enough. (Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy)

February 8, 2021 5:55pm

Numeric Citizen

Greg Morris recently on his blog about trying hard as a blogger to make something out of all this: “I asked, I’m giving, and I am still blogging — now more than ever.” Strangely, pure coincidence I guess, I wrote this last week-end “The journey is the Reward” in which I said: “It doesn’t really matter if nobody comes and reads my stuff here or there. What matters is the process and the thinking that took place behind my writing. Continue reading →

February 4, 2021 9:29pm

Numeric Citizen

Here is something absolutely fascinating and surprising to me. According to my main blog’s visitors statistics, thanks to my recent switch to Plausible, over the last thirty days, the distribution of devices type used to visit my blog puts the tablet far behind the desktop, the laptop and the smartphone. One would think the tablet form factor to be much more popular. The iPad is massively popular. I’m still in love with this form factor after all these years. Continue reading →

February 1, 2021 1:24pm

Numeric Citizen

I like to see other people talk about their own writing or blogging workflows. Here’s an interesting tidbit from Greg Morris about using Apple’s Shortcut to publish to WordPress: “Shortcuts is a really robust way to publish to WordPress and not have to use the WordPress app or third-party app.” Apple’s Shortcuts are also an important part of my blogger workflow. Since I’m using Ulysses, which supports publishing directly to WordPress, I don’t need a shortcut for that. Continue reading →

January 26, 2021 7:22am

Numeric Citizen

Someone stoled my most recent article. I hate when this happens. I guess my article was good enough for this guy to bother. This morning, I got a pingback on WordPress for an article being published elsewhere as shown below. Someone copied my latest article “The Ultimate Twitter Tips and Tricks for Mastering Your Twitter Experience”. By doing so, he forgot to remove one of the URL pointing back to another previously published article, “My Review of Mailbrew: a Powerful and Time-Saving Internet Information Aggregator”, I was notified via a pingback. Continue reading →

January 24, 2021 9:48am

Numeric Citizen

I just published one of my most difficult to write article in a long time. It is about transforming your Twitter experience to make it more focused, enjoyable, tailored to your personal interests. I’ve been working on it for the last few months. Along the way of writing this long piece, my Twitter experience was profoundly changed. I’m pretty happy with the end results. If you’re on Twitter, consider giving a look to this guide. Continue reading →