Creative summary

My Weekly Creative Summary for the Week of 2024/06

It was a slow week overall. I got a cold on Sunday, and I was slow at everything for most of the week. It was a super busy week at the office too. Nonetheless, here’s this week’s summary! I hope you enjoy that one!

JF Martin

18 Feb 2024 — 7 min read

A popular photo that I published during the week on Pixelfed.

👨🏻‍💻 39 articles posted 😃
🏞️ 9 photo(s) shared 🙂
🎙️ No podcast episode(s) published 😔
📺 No YouTube video published 😔

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Personal

1️⃣ More than ever, my creative hobbies pay off at work at many levels. I do try to be creative when talking to clients. I do diagramming for specific projects, and people usually like my work. Writing is a big part of my job; I'm pretty good at it. I'm not sure all my clients read everything I write for them (I'm paid to do reports!). But I take great pleasure in writing for the IT field. 2️⃣ Speaking of work, this week wasn't easy. I'm involved in a complex migration-to-the-cloud project, and we are hitting significant roadblocks. I rarely find myself in such a state, and I wouldn’t say I like that. I need to work overtime to overcome challenges I don't like. I had to work this weekend, and I had much less time than usual to do other things like writing this newsletter! 3️⃣ Not all is bad, though. I had to do diagrams using LucidChart, which I consider the best diagramming. Still, I wouldn't say I like Visio, and I cannot understand why Visio is so prevalent in IT. That being said, I prepare some rough versions of the diagrams before jumping into LucidChart. I feel less friction doing so. When I switch to LucidChart, I already know how to layout the content. Diagramming is a creative process, and I like it.

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ I discovered Shoutouts, a simple web service for building shoutout embeds that can be displayed on another website. It's easy to set up and fun overall. I'm using it on my blog! Visit a blog post and look at the bottom of the post to see this in action. So far, I have seven shoutouts configured randomly displayed on my blog. Fun.

📖 Reading

1️⃣ Not everything goes according to plans and inspiration. This story about the demise of the “Muse" app is very telling and a fascinating read. It's not wasy to build software. It's even harder to build platforms in the collaborative space.

Read-it-later services are the digital version of that stack of books on your nightstand that you’re never going to read, but with less clutter. — Angelo Stavrow

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ This week, I’m starting to do something different: reworking past content on numericcitizen.me. There are many reasons for doing this, as explained in this article. There is a checklist that is worth keeping close to me when doing these updates. Forget about SEO; it's about adding value or keeping the content relevant. Adding an abstract, updating the header image or using ChatGPT to rewrite a portion of an article are possible changes. 2️⃣ The first edit operation was done on this post about Micro.blog. I added an image, reworked the text with Grammarly, rearranged tags, and added a small call-out at the end to let people know the article was updated. I tested a new title with ChatGPT but wasn't satisfied with the results. The title stayed the same. The one challenge I'm seeing is how to browse past content I wrote one year or two years ago. Ghost doesn't provide an easy way for this. 3️⃣ I'm not currently working on long articles. I have a few started, but I'm not working actively on them. I feel that I'm in a writing lull.

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ Can we edit photos using the Apple Vision Pro? According to this guy, the answer is mostly yes. 2️⃣ Glass 3.6.1 is a new iPhone and iPad app release. Better share sheet and speed are the highlights of this release. This app was already fast enough. I guess faster is even better! 3️⃣ I shared the 600th photo on my Pixelfed account early Sunday morning. I'm still enjoying the ride on Pixelfed while I continue to use Glass. Both are great for sharing content and getting some feedback.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ The general buzz around the Apple Vision Pro makes me reconsider my upgrade plans for this year. I think a visit to the Apple Store for a 30-minute demo of the Apple Vision Pro will help a lot in deciding. Before the Vision Pro, the iPad Pro was the next I considered upgrading. But now, I'm not so sure anymore, especially since I don't use my iPad enough to warrant the upgrade of my aging device. See the table in the exhibits section below for the summary. 2️⃣ Apple has been planting the seeds of generative AI in their mainstream products for a while now. Here's an example on GitHub. They've been doing that with their Apple Vision Pro, inventing all sorts of tech spread into their numerous products only to find the culminant point where everything is crammed into a single platform. Wait for this year's WWDC conference to see generative AI available everywhere. They are busy putting the pieces together.

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ Now I know that Ghost CMS isn't good for helping me manage the content once it has been published. [The problem](2024-02-12 7:21 am) will require some of my time investment to be fixed. I'll have to use Ghost Content API to get around their minimalistic posts management UI. I don't expect this to be overly complicated, though. Skimming through the online documentation, it seems to be an easy-to-understand API. It's now on my to-do list. Meanwhile, here is a full announcement by Manton himself. 2️⃣ My next project is constructing an API request using Ghost Content API. I’m close, but I have problems with the date range. 3️⃣ I finally completed the visual design of my blog after switching themes a few weeks ago. Day and Night, my blog will use a dark theme because it is visually closer to my avatar image, which is also relatively dark. I wrote this article to document the process.

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ Micro.blog finally introduced a new feature for premium subscription users: Notes. With notes, users can create private documents that can be shared using a private link. Notes can serve many purposes: drafting a new post, gathering notes, a pastebin, etc. I’m still trying to figure out what I will use it for. Some community members think of using this for journaling. For now, I don’t see an obvious use case for me. The service comes with a new iPhone and iPad app, Strata. Very simple and effective. I’ll cover this in an upcoming YouTube video. 2️⃣ I subscribed to a fun web service called Shoutouts and added the integration to my blog. A shoutout is displayed at the post's footer when you visit a blog post like this one. Refresh the page to get a different one. I'll be using this to show what I really like. Eventually, there will be affiliate links. 3️⃣ Inoreader 7.7 was released with a useful addition: offline mode for specific feeds or folders. 4️⃣ Maique’s experience with Micro.blog wasn't good at all this week—poor guy. Scroll down to the article for that. 5️⃣ It's been a long time since Ghost introduced new features. The last time it was Nov 16th, 2023. 🤔 6️⃣ Something rather big is coming to Craft. Stay tuned.

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ Sadly, I wasn't able to create a video this week. When I have too much on my plate, doing videos is the one to drop first. Hopefully, I’ll be in a better position next week. I must prepare for what will happen the week after... stay tuned.

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ OpenAI Sora. 👀 Mind blown. They start with one-minute videos; how long before we can ask AI to generate a feature film from a few prompts? AI is going way too fast; we don't have enough time to comprehend what is happening.

I wish you a great week!

💡

This newsletter edition is also available as a Craft shared document here. This week's edition is based on template version 1.1 — 2024-01-28 and was put together with ❤️ on a 15-inch MacBook Air, Craft and many subscriptions! Support my work (Paypal) 🙏🏻