Weekly Posts Digest from Numeric Citizen Microblog
5 min read
On My Photographic Style
The photo thumbnails are from a personal trip to Austria in 1998. When I look back at these photos, I have to come to a conclusion that my photographic style didn’t really change in 30 years. It feels a bit depressing. It is basically revolving about architecture, nature. Very rarely about people, these are too hard to capture; I don’t have a good sense of timing, and I’m shy. I’m rarely doing street photography. The only addition to my subjects in recent years is urban exploration. Do we come into this world with a pre-determined photographic style?
Here is my Glass page.
And my SmugMug page.
Oh and my Unsplash page!
About Micro.blog Upcoming Update — Newsletter Support
Apparently, it looks like tomorrow, Micro.blog is going to add support for newsletters. A few weeks ago, I can’t remember exactly, Manton posted a screenshot (which I can no longer find) where a “newsletter” item was shown on the left sidebar on the Micro.blog main site.
I’m very curious about Micro.blog take on newsletter. Micro.blog is all about simplicity without being too simplistic. If the feature is available to entry-level paid tier, I’m might enable it and use it myself. Right now, I’m using Mailbrew to gather all my published posts via the RSS feed to generate a newsletter. There is one thing though, are we starting to feel a bit of newsletters fatigue?
Can’t wait for tomorrow.
Micro.blog Officially Launches Support for Newsletters
So, as expected, yesterday Micro.blog introduced support for newsletters in the premium subscription tier. The official announcement follows:
Today we’re announcing a major new feature for Micro.blog Premium subscribers: email newsletters. Micro.blog can now manage, letting readers subscribe to your blog and receive emails for new blog posts. It’s deeply integrated into Micro.blog and works great for collecting multiple microblog posts together automatically.
Here is why I upgraded my subscription plan almost instantly after the news came out.
First, I’m a big fan of Micro.blog as a publishing platform and also of its foundational principles. I’m totally ok with paying a monthly fee of $10 to support the team behind—I want the platform to thrive. Second, adding support for newsletters is a great idea. Not everyone is using an RSS feed reader or like to read content through a browser. Everyone uses email clients! It’s important to provide different ways of communicating content to the readers. Newsletters are making a comeback.
Enabling newsletter is dead simple as shown below. I chose the weekly newsletter containing all the posts for the past week. Email go out at 9AM, local time, each Saturday morning. It’s a good way to start the weekend, isn’t it?
As you can see, the settings are quite simple. There is no formatting option (yet). Having a choice between all text vs excerpt would be a useful one. Speaking of formatting, one thing that I’m curious about, though: how does one newsletter look like? I couldn’t find an example in the documentation. Furthermore, how can we preview the next newsletter issue? It seems that, in case the first option is selected (one email for each post), the author has 30 minutes after posting to preview the email as explained here:
@timapple The preview works the same for the weekly and monthly option except it only creates it 30 minutes before it’s ready to send. Micro.blog will send you a preview email automatically with a link to edit it then. — Manton Reece https://micro.blog/manton/12238527
How does Micro.blog newsletter feature fit in my workflow? Micro.blog newsletter joins two other services that I depend on: Mailbrew to create something very similar in nature to Micro.blog offering and Ghost for my monthly newsletter (previously on Substack). On Mailbrew though, my summary newsletter also brings in content published on other platforms (WordPress, Blot, Ghost, Smugmug, etc.). It’s the ultimate weekly posts summary newsletter. Ghost, for my introspection newsletter, is like Substack, but better. I see Micro.blog offering as being a convenient way for my readers to get my content into their mailbox. It won’t replace Mailbrew or Ghost, obviously.
By subscribing to the premium tier, I also get a few goodies that could prove to be useful: bookmarking archiving and highlighting. The former allows for the bookmarking of a post on my timeline. The latter allows me to highlight some text while reading a bookmarked post or URL. Highlighted text can be conveniently used to create a link post easily. One thing that I would love to see is a browser extension for selecting text in any website. I’m not holding my breath, though.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with this addition to an already great service for content creators like me. Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to the weekly digest! So, to those who subscribe, I guess this post is the first to get through the newsletter feature of Micro.blog!
Don’t miss the YouTube video explaining the feature.
Strangely, my last post about the Micro.blog newsletter feature intro wasn’t made available in my timeline but it was published on the website and on the RSS feed. It was scheduled, could this be the cause? @manton @help
2021-12-07
💥So, you’re an #Apple fan, like #photography, care about #privacy, #privacyprotection and #climatechange? We do have many things in common. Why not take a look at my #free newsletter and subscribe? Not sure, visit the link below to see it all in action!🙏🏻
numericcitizen-introspection.blog
2021-12-08
On #Glass Appreciation
Surprise! Today, Glass introduced something I thought would never come: Like! Oops, Appreciation (Announcement on Twitter)! In summary: they are private. They are note at the forefront of the experience. They don’t propels algorithms. They aren’t used to sell targeted ads. They are merely a check box in a database. They are gentle. They are a gift. The team behind Glass is showing sign of lucidity. I like what’s I’m seeing since the start of this special place.
Hey guys, the first microblog posts digest newsletter coming out tomorrow morning, 9EST.
If you didn’t subscribe, it still is time to do so.
numericcitizen.micro.blog/subscribe…
2021-12-10