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Possibly using Alto? alto.so

That’s the same author as Montaigne, so probably related!

BTW I intentionally started with Montaigne even though its styling is pretty minimal – wanted to develop a habit of posting for a few months and seeing how it feels before I “launch” and develop custom tooling. This was another 180 from how I usually do things.

bsky.app/profile/ares...

↑ Yep, thanks! Also explored Quotion in between, which is similar to Montaigne (also syncs from Apple Notes using a shared folder), but its style was too corporate to me. Also, I realized that I actually don’t need to do complex sync via shared notes, so my Notes are all just processed locally.

And I literally sync static files to the server (in a very dumb way right now). Inside Notes, now I also have my own little silly markup on top, like: [images side by side] [use next image as thumbnail] [next video is retina] etc. I just keep improving it bit by bit over time.

I love seeing fellow self-publishing nerds nerding out about process.

Videos have been a big pain so far. I don’t know how to output them well in the weekly newsletter (ran via Buttondown), and even on the web they seem to burn some browsers. But I really wanted to try not to add too much JavaScript to Unsung – another self-imposed constraint.

My system for managing video in email is complex and highly custom but essentially what I do is have the system I use (Eleventy) pull the thumbnail of the YouTube video and the image processing tool I use (Imagor) resize/crop it and put a play button on it as a watermark.