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. It also would be too easy to miss essential tidbits.

What about 2021? Good news, for 2021, I want to be ready. Now it’s the best time to get organized. All year long, I’ll be using the excellent notes taking application called Craft. I already started to put things down. The picture at the top of this post is a glimpse at my journaling space structure, where personal notes will be confined all year long. I’ll use a monthly section for each domain or theme I want to touch on in this future year in review. I’ll see where it goes.

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. It’s tempting to use more focused tools to fill a very specific part of a workflow. At the end of the day, it’s a matter of preference or workflow optimization (you can read about my recent workflow update).

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. It plateaued. The new reader feature coupled with the discovery tab didn’t move the needle at all. We have to wonder if Substack is just a clique in disguise.

You can read my past newsletters by visiting my Substack page. Be sure to subscribe, it’s free!

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. I’m currently testing the service as I write this! I never thought closing my Google analytics account could be a thing. Every new year is the occasion to do things differently, don’t you think?

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. I know what you’re thinking, why not use YouTube which is free!? First, I don’t like YouTube and the business model behind it. I don’t like to depend on Google for my stuff. Vimeo is better in my opinion as a video content platform, for what I want to do. I prefer their embedded video player compared to YouTube’s. I don’t want ads on my feed and on my content. For all these reasons, Vimeo > YouTube.

My Vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/numericcitizen

Now you know. 😎

I’m currently writing a piece about the tools and services I use to help me be more efficient in my blogger workflow. Currently looking at Shortcut Bar - Instant Access on the Mac App Store. I had this utility in my list that I never bought but the features are exactly what I would like to get. Is there any alternatives to this utility? It’s a bit on the expansive side and is not yet updated for M1 Macs and Big Sur look and feel.

Today, unexpectedly and for the first timr, I had a chance to experience Twitter’s Space. It’s a virtual room of twitter users who can speak to each other. When there is an open space, a small icon appear at the top of your timeline among twitter fleets. Tapping on it allows you to enter the space. By default your mic is disabled. You have to request permission first in order to be able to speak. There is a speaker who controls people’s requests to speak. People who are listener can react using emojis. It’s pretty interesting, much more interesting than audio tweets in fact.

I spent maybe ten minutes chatting with the space owner about things like COVID-19, confinement in Christmas time and how to use Twitter space. Others in the room were just listeners. It was pretty cool. I can see myself using this instead of doing a podcast for example. It’s easier to setup up, doesn’t require a distribution platform to maintain. I could setup a space to talk about Apple, photography, privacy or climate change. Can’t wait to try it out with my followers, once the feature officially rollout.

Who knew COVID-19 would have a very positive side effect on me. It started on March 13th of 2020, and it’s still going on nearly uninterrupted. What is it? I have more time than ever to focus on my writing and publishing activities. Why?

As I’m working from home from mi-March of this year, I no longer have to commute. I save countless hours per week just because of this. On top of that, consider many activities on the weekend that no longer can take place because of the on-and-off restrictions in place.

I never wrote or published as much stuff in the last nine months as in the last year or so. I have a lot of projects in my head, small and more significant. I did spend quite a lot as I no longer travelling on software, services, work-from-home equipment. I also have more time for reading than before, it makes a difference.

COVID-19 is transformative at the society level but also a personal level. There are things that I don’t want to return when COVID-19 is no longer among us. Time is a precious resource, once you have it, you don’t want to mess with it.

Now it’s official, Apple is no longer accepting blogs on their news platform, Apple News. I got my rejection mail today (read about my original submission). I understand Apple News as being a… news platform, yet I think Apple is missing an opportunity here. Why? One word: Substack. Another word: Medium. Apple could have done to the written space what they did for the audio world with podcasts. Apple could have created a special place on Apple News for individual writers, not only bloggers per se. This would have been a message of inclusion, diversity and openess. Instead, Apple is again sending a message about begin a walled garden, exclusion, elitism. Too bad.

Fridays are always slow, it seems. Are people simply taking time off social networks, blogs, etc.? Maybe. In any case, I want to send a “have a nice week-end” to my dear readers and followers. 👈🏻 I do have a lot on my plate for this week-end: writing, writing, writing. And some time off too.

Photo credit: Jonas Jacobsson / Unsplash.