My Weekly Creative Summary for the Week of 2024/05

There is always something new, something different, something unexpected that I need to write about. This week is no exception. Lot’s of new stuff. Enjoy the ride!

👨🏻‍💻 40 articles posted 😃 (now including Blips!)
🏞️ 5 photos shared 😔
🎙️ No podcast episode published 😔
📺 1 YouTube video published 😃

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Personal

1️⃣ This week, I'll be out of town starting Friday afternoon and return on Sunday afternoon. This means much less time to write this newsletter. I’m getting anxious about it because most of the work usually happens on the weekend. Hopefully, I'll have most of the work done by Thursday night. 2️⃣ Thursday morning, and the newsletter will be 95% completed! Yes!

🗺️ Discoveries

1️⃣ There is a new app called Feeeed, which acts as an information sources aggregator. Feeeed is a unique feed reader app for iOS that allows users to combine various sources, including RSS feeds, newsletters, social media platforms, and more. It also offers personalization options such as photos from your library, step count updates, and reminders. The app's main tab is a mix of recent and older updates, presented in a curated and distraction-free manner. It also has a customizable widget and an "Explore" tab for discovering new sources. The app is free and available on the App Store for iOS and iPadOS, with a native Mac app in the works. This makes me think about the recently launched Kickstarter project for Tapestry. I will test Feeeed for a while and see how it goes.

📖 Reading

1️⃣ Micro.blog announced a new feature this week: bookmark summary. Now, when saving a bookmark to Micro.blog, a summary will be automatically generated using ChatGPT, provided the site doesn't block ChatGPT crawling. As of now, when saving a bookmark to Micro.blog, you can also set tags, read an archived copy of the article and highlight some text while doing so. What's missing to make Micro.blog a serious read-later service?

👨🏻‍💻 Writing

1️⃣ Most of my writings go to my blog. One reason is that I tend to share small comments or thoughts, which is where they go. But from time to time, a post becomes longer and deeper as I'm writing it. This is why I decide to promote it and publish it on this website instead. It's called Numeric Citizen Space. It doesn't happen often. This is because I want to separate low content velocity from the most busy and noisy content. So far, it served me well. 2️⃣ While searching for an old article about Micro.blog, I found some other posts that needed some content updates. I decided to set a weekly task of reworking my previously published content on my website. Some articles will be updated with new information; others might be fully reworked, and some might get deleted. The idea here is to find new triggers for more writing project ideas. 3️⃣ I officially started and announced “Blips” in the middle of the week. It results from an impulsive decision to test Scribbles, a new blogging service still in beta. Blips is at the other end of the writing spectrum: the shortest form of writing. That's why it is called “Blips".

Numeric Citizen Blips 📡✨

Compulsive creator. Digital nomad. Noisy. Why Blips?

Scribbles

🌄 Photography

1️⃣ My preferred photo-sharing paid service, Glass, is announcing a new feature: Series. With Series, people can share a group of images in a single post. Series can live for a long time and users can add photos to them as they see fit. I do like the possibility of grouping related photos. I recently tried a similar feature on Pixelfed where you can select a group of up to ten images, but the user experience is far from optimal. According to the Glass announcement, the upload experience seems far better and more refined and yet familar. The feature should arrive this spring for Patreon-supporting users (like me) and later in the summer for everyone else. 2️⃣ I have a few photo series in mind for Glass's upcoming Series feature. On Exposure, I had a four-part macro-photography series; each season had a set of photos. I'll re-publish them on Glass, since I closed my Exposure account.

A Look at Series

Our biggest release, coming soon.

🍎 Apple

1️⃣ This is the second week of full availability of the Apple Vision Pro. I'm seeing a change in tone about the Apple handset. It's like people are slowly integrating what it means in their digital life to wear and use this headset. People are slowly but surely accepting this idea that, after all, it's not that bad, thanks to some newfound use cases…

"It feels like this success has inflated Apple’s view of themselves, twisting their perspective of what matters.” — Manton Reece

🚧 Special projects

1️⃣ I expect an update to the Cards theme for Micro.blog, and I'll spend some time tweaking my blog website. The developer behind it often works on it if Github is any indication. If you follow current issues discussed on Gitbub, I'm not out of the woods with this, but things are improving. 2️⃣ URL as a sentence is a great idea. They probably help to move the SEO needle, too. As reported in the article, the author registered a domain name which ends with “.IS". The full domain is the author's name. Each article published contains the whole sentence, which always translates into the article's URL. I wish I could do the same: “numericcizen.is/always-thinking-about-something-new-to-create.html". It's clever. The problem is that this top-level domain is reserved for Iceland and cannot be renewed forever (here's why). Too bad. 3️⃣ Creating a new blog using Scribbles took me less than an hour. It was fun. The project didn't take too much of my time. It was fun.

Neatnik Notes · URL as a sentence

📱 Apps & Services

1️⃣ On my MacBook Air, I made the Arc Browser the default browser (but not on my Mac mini, here is why). After testing it for a few days, I'm totally in love with it. It is a simple browser but not a simplistic one. It has nice design touches all over. I have a few extensions installed to complement its features: AnyBox, Omnivore, ReadWise, Markdown load, and Inoreader. The focus of Arc Browser is content; everything is cleverly hidden but not at the price of making it difficult to recall. 2️⃣ Craft v.2.7.0 came out on Monday and made a big positive splash! For the first time, I could release a “what's a new video" right at the same time, thanks to the collaboration of the Craft team, who let me beta-test this release a week in advance. See the next section. 3️⃣ Zavala version 2.3 came out, too, with a bunch of improvements. 4️⃣ Another interesting discovery in the Arc Browser: I can quickly create a linked quote like the one below. When shared on social networks like Mastodon or over iMessage, I get a nice preview. Clicking on the link brings the user to the website, positioned at the exact place of the highlighted text.

Quote from “Popularity contests · Indie Microblogging”

A Proposal For Bringing Social Indicators to Micro.blog

Is there a taboo on Micro.blog? It depends to who you ask. Here’s a proposal.

Numeric Citizen SpaceJF Martin

📺 YouTube

1️⃣ Early in the week, I shared a video about the latest release of Craft, version 2.7.0. This release is a major one in the short Craft history. I had the chance to test the beta a week before its release and get in touch with one of the developers at Craft. For this release, I asked if my video could be part of their release notes or at least refer to it. He couldn't commit on it. The goal for me was to get the most exposure and help the users community to transition easily to this new release. So far, this is on track to become my most watched video of all time.

💎 Miscellaneous

1️⃣ Someone on Reddit posted a diagram of a productivity system based on Notion and Readwise. I always like those diagrams and posts because they give a peek at someone's workflow. I’m a bit jealous because I know that the system presented works better than mine. I depend on Craft a lot, and many things are missing in Craft that block me from using a similar workflow: APIs are one of those things. 2️⃣ In a recent video from Manton Reece showing the bookmarks-related features, I noticed an addition in the left sidebar of the Micro.blog website: Notes. I think this “leak" was not intentional. But I noticed it and went ahead sharing it on my blog. Manton's reaction was funny. What does a “Notes' feature mean for Micro.blog users? Soon, we will be able to store notes using a dedicated app on our phones. Only text? Audio notes? How would I use this new feature? For which new use case? So many questions, so few answers.

🔮 Looking ahead

1️⃣ A new app from the maker of Reeder is in the works and looks interesting. It seems to be similar to Feeeed and Tapestry but with the look and feel of Reeder. It's interesting to see what appears to be the emergence of a new type of app for consuming content spread across many heterogeneous timelines. Could this be the consequence of the massive movement off Twitter to Mastodon, because of the Fediverse, Bluesky or, more which enables such decentralization? It could be.

Silvio Rizzi (@rizzi@gloria.social)

Attached: 1 image I guess it’s time for an update on what I’ve been working on over the last year: A new app, completely rebuilt and rethought from the ground up. This probably won’t replace the current Reeder (not going away) for a lot of users. It’s not just an RSS reader. The app allows you to access content from various other sources like Podcasts, YouTube, Mastodon, and more. It won’t sync everything, only your saved items (favorites etc). No more unread counts, it remembers the scroll positions instead.

Gloria

I wish you a great week!

Exhibits 👀