Hi, this is New York Citizen, and you are listening to Thoughts and Tribulations of a Compulsive Creator podcast.

This is episode number six, wrapping up 2023.

First, hi everyone, and thank you for listening.

I wanted first to thank you everyone for reading, watching, or listening to my work.

I don’t know how many of you guys are, but I do feel that there are many people who are actually listening or watching or reading my work, and for that I’m very grateful, and I wanted to really thank you for being there.

I don’t know how many people actually are reading my content, but I do think that looking at the plausible analytics, you are quite a few, and also on my YouTube channel, I think you are close to a thousand people who are watching from time to time the videos that I’m putting out there.

So again, thank you for being there.

The year 2023 was kind of a busy one.

I think it’s a transition year for me because of the changes I made to the tools and services I depend on as a creator.

The first big change was to move out of WordPress.com for hosting my main website, and also moving out or dropping altogether Substack, because I was using Substack for the newsletter that I was doing at the time.

And since then I moved to Ghost, and this move was, I think it was a good one, and it’s not because it’s cheaper, it’s about the same price, but the functionalities that I’m getting out of Ghost are way better than what I used to have under WordPress.

And also, in parallel of that, I did embrace the open web by opening and using Mastodon and the BlueSky account, and more recently, like in the last few months, I was very active and I’m still active on PixelFed, which will replace SmogMog as a paying subscription for sharing my photos.

And I’m really happy to have embraced the open web because more than ever, I’m getting interaction with people who like what I’m doing, and I do enter more into interaction with other tweeters just because I’m using, and I made those changes regarding the open web.

And I’m really happy about that.

I do, I think I will do, I will try to be more active on Mastodon and BlueSky in the upcoming months, but for now, I’m more using those platforms to cross-post my work, which is published on Microblog or on Ghost.

I also have the feeling that I accomplished most of what I was hoping for, for the year.

I had many things that I wanted to write and publish starting in 2023, and now I feel that the backlog has decreased quite a lot.

And the last thing I wanted to share with you is a look back at my 30 years in information technology landscape, and yeah, I did publish this piece today, actually, on my website.

I encourage you to get a look at it if you want to know more about my professional background.

Also, I’ve been contemplating the idea of selling templates, like a lot of people are doing with Notion, and selling templates with Notion is very popular, and I wanted to try the same thing at selling templates, but built using Craft.

There are many templates available on the Craft website for free, but I wanted to build a few ones that I think are of better value.

So I selected Gumroad as a platform to sell these templates, and I must say that the results are way beyond what I was expecting, but I do see a downward trend, because I think there’s a discoverability problem with Gumroad, and I’ll have to find a way to kind of publish or share my templates on different platforms so people get to know that they exist.

So I’m looking for that in the upcoming months.

This year, I started this podcast, which I love to produce, and I started also, kind of at the end of September, a weekly newsletter about highlighting my creative work during each week, and I really love to produce them.

And the last weekly newsletter will be sent tomorrow, actually, and this will be the last one for the year.

There are two articles left to be published before the end of the year.

One is a review of the Craft year, highlighting the major milestones and releases of Craft, and the other one is kind of the same thing for my creative journey for the year, which should be out in the next week or so.

And those two pieces will mark the end of my creative work for the year.

And also, I do have the feeling that my creative workflows and the toolset that I’m depending on to create my content is getting to a point where I don’t see major changes to be done in these.

I feel that I’m using the right tool for the many use cases, and I’m getting more efficient and productive in creating or producing things like YouTube videos or this podcast, actually.

And so I don’t expect much change to happen in the near future, but yeah, I do feel that I’m getting better at creating my content.

One of the major additions in the recent weeks was the use of Generative AI to help me out with my English.

You have to know or remember that I’m not an English guy.

My mother language is French, so sometimes I need some help from ChatGPT to support my work, and it made a lot of difference in my work.

And I also wrote and published my AI usage guidelines to state how and when I’m using Generative AI.

I thought it was important to have some guidelines, so I shared them with my readers.

And yeah, so that’s pretty much it for this year.

I’m quite happy, and I think it’s time now to take a pause and have a step back and do something else, because I don’t want to be burnt out with my hobby.

And so in the next two weeks, I’ll be more quiet and spend time with my family.

And so yeah, I think it’s important to take a pause, and that’s it for this last podcast episode for the year.

Thank you for being there.

I wish you happy holidays, and see you guys for the next year, early 2024.

Thank you for being there.

Thanks for listening.

Bye.