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.

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.

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…

I’m about to start a recording session for my next video about Craft and the PARA method. I wonder: why am I doing this? Is it because it might help Craft users to better take advantage of the app features? Is it because I just like being in a creative process? Is it because I love working on the Mac using different apps together to put something out there? Is it all the reasons above? Or is it simply because it provides a subtle reminder of being human is being creative and putting something out there? Maybe I’m asking myself too many questions.

I don’t want to offend anyone here, but what is happening right now in Los Angeles is certainly devastating. It’s really looking like hell on earth. At the same time, we can easily find the exact same hell in Ukraine and many more people are displaced or killed by a totalitarian and evil regime. It’s hard to fight climate change, but we can and must fight what Russia¹ in its current form and to for what it brings to this world. Two images, two tragedies.

While working on the next edition of the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter, I wanted to proofread and rewrite some text portions. I first started with Apple Intelligence Writing Tools then pasted the results into Craft. Grammarly instantly took the ball and verified the pasted text, highlighting everything wrong that needed some attention. Is Apple Writing Tools sloppy or Grammarly too picky? Writing in English is not an easy thing for me to do. And it’s not easy for generative AI either, apparently. From what I understand, Grammarly tries to be less wordy and is very iterative in its text proofing execution.

Here is the final tweaked version:

1️⃣ First and foremost, I want to extend my warmest wishes for a prosperous and fulfilling new year. I genuinely hope you find success and happiness in your professional and personal endeavors. 2️⃣ Secondly, this marks the inaugural edition of this newsletter for 2025, and I’ve decided to introduce a few changes. Firstly, I’ve decided to eliminate the summary at the beginning of each newsletter. This section provided an overview of the number of blog posts, photos, and other content I’ve shared since the previous edition. While I appreciate the interest in these statistics, I believe it’s unnecessary to brag about them, and it takes a significant amount of time to maintain and update this information. I’ve also officially decided to retire the podcasts section from my newsletter. While I enjoy podcasts, I don’t find them particularly relevant to my current content creation schedule, and I believe it’s not worth dedicating time and resources to them.

I old enough to be one of those who witnessed the birth of MTV and music videos… but I rarely watch those these days… but today, I decided to spend some time watching what’s « hot ». A few observations are in order: video duration is short (less than 3 min), hyper-short scenes abuse (less than two seconds in duration), 4:3 screen ratio is strange (is this a thing now?)… I barely can stand this shit now. I’m getting old, I guess.

Dislike buttons on YouTube, or elsewhere for that matter, should come with a mandatory “here’s why I don’t like this” explanation text field. In this specific case, 2 people out of 18 didn’t like my video. Why? How can I improve myself if you don’t tell me what’s wrong? This is the part of social web that I feel doesn’t work.

Manuel Moreale link posting on the subject of header images on blog posts:

“I’ll go one step further Nelson, I have a growing hatred towards pointless images in blog posts in general, I don’t even care if they’re AI-generated or not. If they’re there as part of the content then by all means use them but if you’re just adding a stock image from unsplash to make the page “feel” more interesting then you’re just part of the broader problem that’s plaguing the web.”

Header images do add to the page load times, yes I do use AI-generated images from time to time, like in this post where I wanted to make a point, and I use many of my personal photos… like in this edition of the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter. Yes, I prefer header images on that specific blog because it is part of its visual theme. So then what? That’s MY corner of the web. I do what I find cool and creative and whatever.

I’m guessing he’s reading none of my blogs because of this, among other reasons?

I’ve played a bit with my wife’s iPhone 16 Pro Camera Control. I think it is cool but not practical. It is the best case of feature or functions overloading on a single control. I think it’s hard to compete against discrete on-screen camera controls because these are much quicker to invoke and the error rate is low. I don’t see the Camera Control to live for a long time as I can’t see a single way of improving it and fixing this usability issue.