I’m asked often what apps I use to produce content. Here is my yearly updated list for 2024.
Content Workflow
- Obsidian - after my seizure I had trouble remembering things and my research led me to personal knowledge management which has been so helpful. I started using Evernote again, I was an early adopter way back when, butt it wasn’t helping me. Then I used Notion but it was so slow and my Internet speed at the time was really slow which made it impossible to use. Then I switched to Obsidian, which allows me to keep my entire PKM system on my computer, and it’s backed up to the cloud in two different spots. It’s superfast, and the plugin community is outstanding. It has helped me recover from my seizure by keeping everything I need to remember in it, in my text files. Not only that, but it’s future-proof more than most of the PKM systems that are so hot on the market right now.
- Readwise - I read a lot, and keeping my highlights and track of all the articles I read is a lot of work. Readwise and Readwise Reader are wonderful, and the highlights are synched automatically to my Obsidian PKM system, which makes my research and writing so simply.
- GoPro or iPhone - Apple - we use both to produce video
- Zoom is used for classes and private sessions with clients.
- Descript for editing video quickly with AI. I won an award from them, using their Studio Sound feature to produce a video I recorded using my GoPro on the beach in front of my home. Killer feature really. But, the automatic way it gets rid of audio gaps and my filler words is remarkable. I haven’t used Final Cut Pro in ages because of Descript. We also use it to get transcriptions, its AI is excellent at making very accurate transcriptions. We also turn audio podcasts into videos easily by adding section graphics. The turnaround time on transcriptions is less than a minute, too. This tool is amazing and saves a ton of time.
- LanguageTool - the spell and grammar check is wonderful but the rephrasing tool to take some of my run-on sentences and making them simpler has great helped me since my gran mal seizure. I sound better than before my seizure. The macOS desktop app work in many apps as well, which is really nice.
- Midjourney - I first used MidJourney to help full-fill my artistic side, which had been on hold since my last seizure in 2019. It has been a lot of fun. Then, when I started writing more and needed some cover images, I just naturally used MidJourney. My three newsletters use it, and all my graphics here on this site are done using MidJourney with creative mode on. We have different styles for each newsletter, and Midjourney is simply spectacular. Midjourney has replaced using paid images.
- Canva - Plus, one newsletter, uses Canva to create some graphics that need text on top. Another list has a team member who is an ace with Photoshop to do the same thing.
- Eagle - I produce countless images and Eagle allows me to organize them in one place and export them in the exact sizes I require for email, websites, and YouTube thumbnails. Each of them require a different size and two formats. It also exports to WebP format, which is a lot smaller than JPG or PNG. All my graphics on two of my websites use WebP, which helps a lot in getting 99 or 100 website speed tests.
- WordPress.org, Jekyll and ChatGPT- we still use WordPress for two sites where we have several people updating pages and posts. One site uses WooCommerce (a WordPress plugin ecosystem) to sell digital products. This website is just my personal site and I use Jekyll to produce this static website, so I don’t have to run and pay my team to get WordPress plugins and themes up to date constantly. And we have used ChatGPT to create a one-page website using BootStrap framework and let the AI do all the work.
- Vimeo - private videos of products are hosted by Vimeo. Makes it easy to share links in WordPress WooCommerce.
- Sendy - this self-hosted newsletter email program is about 25 times more inexpensive than the popular newsletter email systems. We do have to maintain it ourselves, an occasional upgrade, and setup was a little technical, but it does everything we need at a small fraction of the cost.
- ChatGPT - We use ChatGPT as well as Descript AI to product podcast summaries, YouTube descriptions, email subject lines, article SEO titles and some content but mostly as rewrites of an article we wrote and need to polish it off.
- StreamYard - We use StreamYard to livestream to multiple platforms. It handles a ton of destinations easily. The studio has a lot of nice features I got used to using our old platform OBS.
Team
- Team communications with my team in Manila, Philippines is still done with Slack and has been for years. I don’t see a change in that. We love it.
- Google Workplace - We have been using Google Workplace for a long time for email, calendar, docs and slides.