I thought I’d revisit this one after coming into taking another little social media break. I truly believe if you want to blog more then come off social media. I don’t mean delete your account, I mean delete the apps on your phone and replace them with your blogging platform app.

Anything you were going to share on social media would probably be best thinking about a bit more and turning into a blog post.

I also believe that coming out of the version of the world the social media companies want you to see isn’t a bad thing either.

I find that having less influence on what I’m told I want to see and influence from others helps me form my own opinion and come up with different takes on stories I want to write about.

Give it a go, 30 days with no social media but only blogging.

I’ve been struggling with my workflow and in particular the devices that I am going to use in my day to day and might have hit a really nice writing workflow that will work out for me when I’m on macOS. When I switched back to the Mac I didn’t have a clue what apps to use outside of the core apps that come with macOS but I decided to find the right episode of Mac Power Users and get to customising my MacBook that I am going to use as my daily machine for now.

On listening I decided to install Setapp and wow it’s already proving to be a cost saver. I installed iStatMenu (to keep an eye on battery and to have a nice view of the time and weather in the menu bar), CleanMyMac (to let it take a look at how I can get the most out of this laptop in terms of managing space) and most importantly MarsEdit.

I’ve got it installed and connected to my Wordpress blog, which I can publish to directly from this one app. The layout lets me write, add tags, categories and images all within one app that can be customised to my liking. 

It’s much nicer to use than the Wordpress app on iOS and having the flexibility of being able to create short posts from my iPhone on the Wordpress app and also this powerful app in MarsEdit is leaving me enthusiastic about sticking with this MacBook and adapting to it rather than jumping back in and replacing my iPad Pro.

I’ll update as I get more stuff done on macOS, I thought it might be interesting hearing about workflows from someone coming to the Mac from iPad.

Let me know some of your favourite Setapp apps.

I’ve been away for a while but I’m trying to get back in the habit of using iA Writer for my blogging. The Wordpress app (for me) has gotten to the point that it’s slowing me down and forcing me to use their block editor.

My only concern is how I easily publish to Wordpress via iA, something this post will test for me. If this looks ok then it’s working.

I’ve always seen my blog as somewhere I can share my passions, not one thing but across multiple interests. What I’m finding is I got little to no feedback or views on non tech content. I’m not saying this is a bad thing as it’s given me somewhere to get stuff off my chest as I don’t have an avenue to do this in my day to day. Working at home is pretty isolating so being able to share here is great but getting no feedback is starting to become a bit demoralising to be honest.

I’m not going to stop talking about things I’m passionate about but might need to take a step back and figure out the sort of content I can bring value to.

At the moment I have no idea if I’m bringing value to anything.

I’ve put pressure on myself in the past to post something everyday but if you’re not reliant on income from your blog then it’s perfectly fine to post as and when you have something to say. For me I’m on a break from social media at the moment so this is my only outlet. I’ve found I’m posting daily or more because I’m not using social media.

My posts tend to be more thoughts than epic reviews etc… I like having an outlet that’s mine to post whenever I want.

Don’t get me wrong my blog doesn’t cause me any stress at all (now I’ve given up thinking about making any income from it) but I still felt like I had to post daily.

I guess this ramble is just to say if you own your own blog don’t put any pressure on yourself, post when you have something to say and enjoy it.

(Also experiment with dropping social media for a week and put your thoughts on your blog instead).

I’ve been getting so much spam recently that outweighed the good ones so I’ve followed most blogs and turned off comments on the blog. I have had them on and off for a while but whilst managing spam today I’ve turned them off for good.

Thanks to everyone that has commented in the past.

After recently making the switch over to the notes app Bear I needed to see how good my options were for exporting over to my blog. Well in a nutshell, there aren’t options for posting directly to your Wordpress blog I.e. there is no integration.

The only option (from iOS) is to use the share sheet and pick Wordpress, this is the same as I would do if I were using say Apple Notes.

This definitely has me rethinking my choice of moving to Bear and will start to look at alternatives such as Ulysses and Drafts.

This is a Markdown post from Apple Notes

Giving markdown within Apple Notes a go to post to my site.

Here’s a link test.

I’ve updated my feed in Apple News to point to the new site, here’s the link to open in the News App.  It might take a few days to update.

• Apple News

Now I’m seriously planning out moving from social media I need to be better at finding other ways to share my content.

First up is getting a proper RSS feed for my site sorted out, you can see the link in the MENU on my site or use this link

• LJPUK RSS