Blogging

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 →

January 21, 2021 7:02am

Numeric Citizen

In “A Love Letter to the Link Post”, CJ Chilvers lament the lost of link posts from the blogosphere. Link posts marked the debut of so many websites raison d’être back in the nineties: “At that time, they weren’t even called blogs. You’d simply update the front page of your website every day with a few interesting links you discovered since the day before.” I love link posts. I follow many bloggers just to have a peek at their discoveries and comments about them. Continue reading →

January 12, 2021 9:41pm

Numeric Citizen

This is a test with (redacted) currently in alpha, which introduces support for posting to Micro.blog. I’m a big user of (redacted). This new feature alone could significantly enhance and simplified my blogger workflow. I’ve been waiting for this feature for a long time. When the update is ready, on iPad or the Mac, it means that I’ll be able to start the initial writing in Craft, then export to (redacted) using the TextBundle format, finish the editing in (redacted), then publish to Micro. Continue reading →

January 7, 2021 12:21pm

Numeric Citizen

Today, I decided to remove my Friday Notes stories from Medium paywall. In other words, you can read them without paying a penny to Medium. They can be found here, in my Numeric Citizen Tidbits Newsletter. Please, if you like ’em, give ’em some hands claps! Thanks. Continue reading →

January 5, 2021 1:31pm

Numeric Citizen

I got this notification in the Wordpress.app this morning. Six years already. Over the years, I became a paying subcriber of their Business plan. Automattic offers great support when you need it. But in the least year or so, I noticed a change in the way they do business with us, paying members. There are a lot of reminders about additional services available to us. which aren’t free, by the way. Continue reading →

January 4, 2021 2:26pm

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Numeric Citizen

Paolo Amoroso writes on his blog: Back in the early days of blogging, the tech press bashed RSS out of existence as it was supposedly too complex for ordinary users. To the point new bloggers don't even know what RSS is, some recent blogging platforms don't support RSS, and the blogs of new startups sometimes don't provide RSS feeds. It’s a shame in a world where open standards are on the way out. Continue reading →

January 4, 2021 12:12pm

Numeric Citizen

Writing is an important part of my life. It’s all about feeling creative, thinking, taking a pause of everything else. As a blogger, I like when people stop by and take the time to read my blog articles and then response with a comment. It doesn’t happen as often as I would like. I would say, one percent of my visitors will do it. For 2021, I decided to set a new goal for myself: stopping by, taking the time to drop a meaningful comment on a blog post or an article from someone else. Continue reading →

January 4, 2021 8:52am

Numeric Citizen

The year 2020 came to an end without me posting my personal year in review. You might wonder why. I read many reviews in the last few days. Most of them are delightful to read as they contain gems about personal lessons learned, personal discoveries, etc. To write those reviews, you have to be prepared for that particular intention to write about it later. Without notes, it’s nearly impossible and takes too much time to prepare. Continue reading →

January 4, 2021 8:21am

Numeric Citizen

Alan Ralph on Why I Use Pinboard As My Reading List I’ve mentioned before that I use Pinboard for bookmarking webpages of interest so that I can refer to them later. I realize this might seem like an odd choice, given that there are more obvious candidates such as Pocket or Instapaper, so I’ve decided to summarize my reasoning I could add other apps and services like Raindrop (which I tried) or even Notion (which I love) as places to save bookmarks. Continue reading →

December 31, 2020 9:46am

Numeric Citizen

Is Substack the Media Future We Want? “on Substack, the most successful newsletters are almost always written by people who have already cultivated an audience at traditional publications or built up a following elsewhere.” and Substack is a natural fit for the influencer, the pundit, the personality, and the political contrarian. Starting from scratch on Substack is quite a challenge. From the graph shown above, this is the curve of my subscribers count. Continue reading →

December 29, 2020 1:58pm

Numeric Citizen

Mailbrew shared a blog post about the services they use internally for their needs. As a die hard fan of Mailbrew (see my profile here), it’s interesting to see what SaaS they use for their internal use. Especially interesting to me, Plausible, a privacy-friendly analytics. I’m currently using Google Analytics which is free but, you know, it’s Google and it’s too complex for my needs. On the eve of a new year, it would be a nice time to start fresh in that regards. Continue reading →

December 22, 2020 9:55am

Numeric Citizen

I have too many projects on my plate to complete and experiments that I want to try. Today, I’m thinking about subscribing to Vimeo, again. I used to have an active account where I would publish photo processing session recordings with voice over. These sessions are still available by the way (one example here). I stopped doing those because they were time consuming to create and publish. Subscribing to Vimeo’s first paying tier is not cheap. Continue reading →