My 2023 Year in Review as a Compulsive Creator

I like retrospectives because it means having an introspective look back. Looking at the year behind me is a source of reflection and inspiration for what should come next. Here are the highlights of the year.

• Starting in January, I’ve set out five goals. A first for me. I'm happy to report that I met many of them. You can learn more on my landing page.

• Twitter is definitely behind me, I entered the Fediverse world by creating my Mastodon account in February. I couldn't be happier. I'm not spending too much time on Mastodon, but I do pay a visit occasionally to see if I have replies to cross-posted content from Micro.blog. I reply to most of them when I do.

• I finally got out of WordPress in March and moved to Ghost for numericcitizen.me. It was one of my best moves of the year. As a corollary, the price of my toolset subscription decreased significantly as fewer subscriptions were needed, thanks to my drop of WordPress (and many paid plugins that were needed) but also after dropping other services like Pocket.
• I left Substack in April. With Ghost’s embed newsletters feature, Substack became redundant.

• I continued publishing YouTube videos, but the pace slowed in the second half of the year. Since the goal of my YouTube channel was to publish videos about Craft, and the pace of Craft updates slowed, no wonder I produced fewer videos. Yet, I managed to share non-Craft videos, too.
• Since March, I’ve been covering how to use Micro.blog in a new video series. The latest video about this was released near the end of the year for a total of eight videos. Not bad.
• My creative workflow finally feels stable and more focused. The last update was published in November.
• I tried Bluesky starting in April without knowing where this would lead me. As for Mastodon, I don’t visit often, but when I do, I'm looking for replies.

• My generative AI usage increased quite a bit on all platforms, and I was able to define some use cases and ethical rules for using AI. You should read my rules by visiting this page.
• In April, I started experimenting with Wavelength, a secure messaging app. My usage of this app is on and off. I'm participating in some Apple-related discussions when there is an Apple keynote.

• I massively reworked my digital garden, downsizing it to the point of phasing it out entirely and migrating most of its content into my personal landing page. It's another way of focusing my creative energy. I don't see the value of maintaining such a thing all year long.
• My Craft usage evolved and became more focused, preferring to use more focused and dedicated apps like Anybox (bookmark manager), Zavala (outline creator), iA Presenter(visual support for video recording) and Things (task management)

• I made some much-needed changes to my online presence, concentrating my identity under one domain “numericcitizen.me”. The following diagram shows every sub-domain that I use. Most of this is under Cloudflare, with a few things left on GoDaddy.

• I finally decided on those read-later services like Readwise Reader, Matter and Pocket. They are all gone, preferring to focus on RSS and Inoreader. I couldn’t be happier. I dropped Raindrop.io once and for all and started using the excellent Anybox instead.
• Omnivore, an open-source project, is a new addition to my workflow, replacing Matter. I started to use it in May.
• I think I found my Write.as niche: expressing my views and thoughts about the war in Ukraine. I should publish more often because I’m boiling inside.
• It looks like, at the current new rate, I won’t be able to meet my goal of gaining 1000 subscribers to my YouTube channel for the first year. I had had about 813 subscribers by June 6th. Even worse. I met the 850 followers count on July 8th. At the time of publication in mid-December, I had 992 subscribers.
• I decided to start a subscription to FeedPress in mid-May. I'm finally closing into my perfect digital publishing ecosystem.
• After much research, I found a better visual theme for my daily blog website on Micro.blog, I finally made the switch to the Tiny Theme in early June. My digital landscape is getting closer to my desired state.

• In June, I got back into photography a bit more as I was preparing for my vacation in Morocco.
• In July, I officially joined Pixelfed, a fediverse-based photo-sharing service. Then I proceeded to migrate my photos from Instagram to Pixelfed. Finally, I deleted my Instagram account.

• Still in July, I started to learn to use Midjourney. I shared my first experience here.
• In August, I started a new Podcast named “Thoughts & Tribulations of a compulsive creator.".
• In early September, I started a new newsletter (link) named “My Weekly Creative Summary”. Putting each edition together is a lot of fun and not too much work.
• In mid-September, I started to think about the implications and the process of migrating off Adobe Lightroom. It won't be an easy process and will take time. Will it be worth it, besides saving money? The jury is still out on that one.
• By the end of September, my reworked reading workflow was finally completed. All the details are here.
• In early October, I switched the numericcitizen.me visual theme, going from Casper to Source. Now I like it a lot! I’m done with tweaks to my website for this year!

• Still, in October, I decided to sell some Craft Templates on Gumroad. I’ve been following this online store for quite a while but never had the opportunity to sell something. Just like Notion, templates can be popular when they are well-designed, fill a specific use case and target a well-defined audience. So far, I'm really surprised by my relative success!
• In November, I started investing some of my spare time in learning to use ChatGPT for my creative workflow. I gave some thought to my relationship with AI for my creative work. I developed a few GTP ideas and added Gen AI to many parts of my creative workflow.
• In December, I started a feature requests board on Canny.io for the Craft users community. There is no such thing, and people are asking for it. I decided to build one since the Craft team won’t do it. I got some pushback from a few Reddit users, but I keep going forward.

That’s a wrap for 2023! See you in 2024 for another chapter of my creative journey!