I recently came back from a one-week vacation in Cancun, Mexico. The first thing I did before leaving the airport to go home was to call an Uber taxi. My last experience with Uber went well, but it was quite a while. Boy, this time it was a surprising and unexpected experience. After ordering the car, I was met with a plethora of notifications and ads within the application and via Uber Eat to order food on the go or before arriving at home. Those ads took the form of notifications, but also big popups taking the whole screen within the application. It was so intrusive, it wasn’t always clear how to dismiss the ad to return to the actual trip details.

I understand the idea of integrating two different services from the same company, but doing so at the expense of a great user experience with the basic feature of the application is not the way to go with me. Even Apple sometimes seems to be going in that direction. Not good.

If you own a desktop Mac, you probably use an external drive for Time Machine. If you use a portable Mac, most likely not, and according to the Tidbits article, you’re not alone. The portability of the Mac is hindered by having an external drive hooked permanently. I, personally, have a different strategy: I use a Synology NAS DS720+ with Time Machine enabled to do my backups over the wireless network. It works perfectly, but I don’t do a full backup of my MacBook Air. Files that are part of iCloud Drive are excluded (read more here, you’ll find out why it’s a good idea). In fact, most of the files are excluded, except a few critical folders, outside the scope of any cloud syncing services. Applications aren’t backed up either (easy to recover in case of lost). Backups are small but are just what I need to protect my work.

Why is Carrot Weather so popular? I’m a weather enthusiast and I like trying new weather-related applications. I use many all year long, but Carrot Weather is not part of my application arsenal. They recently introduced updated weather maps, but to get a sense of them, I would need to subscribe for a year subscription. Most of the interesting features are available in the premium tier. I like the maps feature, but I wonder how better they will get compared to the ones that I’m already using in MyRadar. iOS 15 brought a significant update to the weather too, but I find the maps lacking radar resolution.

If there are users of Carrot Weather subscription, tell me more, tell my why it is so nice?

Well, well, well, it seems that data portability among CMS is an issue. Who knew! I’m trying to find an easy way to move a few posts from my WordPress blog into my Ghost website. Exporting data from WordPress seems like an all-or-nothing situation. There are a few plugins available for this. The problem is that the content isn’t easily imported into Ghost. The latter does have a plugin, but it doesn’t support selecting posts. I don’t want to do this manually.

Any idea or suggestions?

Update 2022-02-16: There is a follow-up to my quest, read all the details here

I think it’s worth it and it’s important. The transaction was easy (Apple Pay), which makes a big difference. Consider this an impulsive buy.

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.

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.

Boooooo… Well, it looks like I changed my mind. I didn’t remember that I wrote this blog post following the release of Ghost 4.0. At the time, I didn’t see the benefit, but now, it’s quite another story. I really love Ghost and I think I made the right choice for a few significant reasons:

1. Ghost comes with APIs, which enable all sort of possibilities to improve my workflow.
2. Ghost editor is much more powerful than Substack’s. This week, they started to release new cards type: GIF and Button. They promise another ten before Christmas! Yeah!
3. I prefer Ghost’s design in general over Substack.

In case you didn’t know, my newsletter website is reachable here: https://numericcitizen-introspection.blog

Timery received a major addition in this week’s update: REPORTS! As I wrote recently, I’m tracking the time I spend on my blogging and content creation activities. Timery is my go-to client for Toggl, a time tracking service. Having access to reports within the application, instead of heading to the Toogl’s website is really helpful. Now, looking forward for Timery to support macOS Monterey’s Shortcuts!

In a recent announcement by Readwise.io:

We’re now in position to reimagine aspects of the digital reading experience itself, from how you annotate a document, to how you navigate. Readwise as you know it today isn’t going anywhere, but this is our future.

And:

With the new Readwise reading app, not only will these resurfacing and syncing features not go away, they will be enhanced through tight integration into the reading experience.

There is much more to digest on their published essay. They’ve been thinking about this for a while and judging from a few screenshots, their reading app seems compelling and well done. I’m hoping they will support Safari’s extensions. RSS feeds will be supported too. Sadly, it will probably be another Electron-based app. We’ll see if this doesn’t affect too much the experience.

I’ve been a subscriber of Readwise.io for a while, but I must admit that I’m not taking advantage of it as much as I would have liked. It does get synced with my Pocket account, but that’s about it. Oh, and my saved quotes get resurfaced in my Mailbrew summary newsletter, which is cool.

I’ve subscribed to their private beta testers waiting list and I can’t wait to try it out. If all goes well and is up to what they say on their blog post, this could entirely replace Pocket for me.

I recently noted that I’m spending much more time on Mailbrew website for my newsletters reading rather than in HEY Feed. Why is that? Well, I think there are a few sticky features in Mailbrew that helps me better process information tidbits. First, the reading experience is great. The “Read” button next to a URL will bring a nicely formatted version of an article from a URL. Second, A “save” button is handily available for me to use if I want to keep a piece of information for later use. My collection of saved items is growing by the day. There’s also the Save to Mailbrew bookmarklet that comes handy. The website on the iPad is also a joyful experience.

Mailbrew update schedule is pretty fast and brings many small improvements on a constant flow. Now, if only there was a highlighting feature it would make Mailbrew reading experience a perfect fit for my workflow.

By the way, thanks to Mailbrew, you can get a weekly summary of all my publications here.

They flipped the switch to ON. HEY World is LIVE! I’m so glad, curious and already excited to use this other channel to share my written content with the world. I’m already thinking about my first post on this new platform. Furthermore, I think this addition brings even more value to an already useful service, on which I depend every single day. Recently, I asked: How many websites can a blogger have? Well, as soon as a newcomer doesn’t add too much friction when publishing content, it’s ok to have many. HEY World seems to be such a service. Count me in.

I recently published a long piece about transforming your Twitter experience by using Twitter lists instead of following a bunch of accounts. As noted in the article, one side effect of this approach is that services that look for your Twitter account’s list of people you follow won’t really work. That’s the case for a new service called “Spoonbill”.

Keep updated on your friends' and family members' bios, websites, locations, and names.

Spoonbill will send you a summary of changes that occurred on Twitter’s bio of people you follow. I wonder if this service can be tweaked to use Twitter’s lists instead. What about Mailbrew, maybe they could come up with a similar feature, which would be really cool.

In the meantime, I’m not coming back to following two thousands people.