I started using the static site-friendly, largely non-creepy Tinylytics service in 2023, and a few weeks ago, I finally forked over the money for the paid version of the service. [EDIT: I’ve since cancelled my subscription to the service because I’m no longer sure it aligns with my values.] This year, I’ve become skeptical enough of quantification as a concept that I feel vaguely guilty about tracking which of my posts get how many views, but I’m also a researcher who understands the value of quantification, and it’s also, well, validating to see which of my posts get traction.

Setting up media reviews for my blog is one of the best side projects that I’ve done in the past couple of years, and I’m happy to be doing a yearly recap for 2024 like I did for 2023. In fact, I started a new review workflow for listening to radio shows, which feels like a bonus (and helps take away from my lower read count this time around). Before my 2025 edition of this, I hope to revamp my review posting some.

Several days ago, I posted that: One of the biggest gaps in my current website-first approach to social media is an inability to snap a picture and quickly post it. I’ve wanted to tackle this for a while, but an upcoming cool vacation has me thinking I should really go for it. A couple of days later, I realized I wasn’t alone in this when Alex Sirac picked up the post on their website, and it got another sympathetic comment there, too.

My dad has been logging the books he reads since he was a teenager, and I’ve always wanted to try something like that out. I gave it a go in 2022 with a notebook, but I quickly realized I wanted to journal that information, too. Since I journal in Day One, that meant logging reading digitally, so at the end of 2022, I started building some Siri Shortcuts for blogging about books.

Back in July, I shared that I’d figured out how to use the Habitica API to create a Siri Shortcut for updating Habitica from my Apple Watch. A few weeks ago, Hypothesis user cormacauty left a comment on that post asking for more information about how I’d done that. This post is a (belated) response to that, in the form of sharing the Siri Shortcuts that I wrote. Part of the reason that it took so long for me to get to this is because I needed to duplicate and edit the Shortcuts to strip out my API key—I’m happy to share my work but don’t want other people to be able to make changes to my account for me.

Unborking my blogging automations has been a pain, but on the upside, changing how I do it in Siri Shortcuts has fixed something small in my linkposts that’s bugged me for years.

Si vous voyez ce message, j’aurai réussi à refaire mes raccourcis pour poster depuis mon portable.

Something somewhere has borked, and now my Siri Shortcuts for near-effortless posting to Hugo from my phone are producing dumpster fire text files filled with URL encoded characters instead of the real things. Gonna have to fix this, but not looking forward to it.

Using Siri Shortcuts and an API, I just made a crude-but-functional Apple Watch implementation for Habitica. Very pleased with myself.

I am one of those people who responds to a lot of work coming my way by ignoring that work and instead trying to think about how to change my routines and workflows. With the summer coming to an end and a new academic year approaching, I’ve been reading productivity books, thinking about the software that I use, and wondering what needs to change. switching to Habitica In particular, as I’ve posted over the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about switching habit trackers.

Update: I’ve figured out the basics of the Habitica API, and now every feature that isn’t native to the service is a challenge to up my programming/Siri Shortcuts game.

This is very exciting! I’m far too locked into Apple’s ecosystem to seriously consider this right now (even this post is being composed thanks to Siri Shortcuts), but I hope this does well, because I’d love to own a Fairphone one day.

Now checking that the tagging system works fine.

I am up late on the busy week before the semester starts trying to write an Alfred workflow for generating Hugo blog posts and a Siri Shortcut to support a new approach to linkblogging, so…

This post is a test of Twitter integration with my new Hugo blog (via Siri Shortcuts).

Hello World! This is a test of a Siri Shortcut for posting to my new Hugo blog from iOS.