My name is Philipp and you are reading Creativerly, the internet corner where I unpack my musings, curate and write about noteworthy apps and software, and explore the latest trends in design and tech.
Hey and welcome to Creativerly 354 👋
I hope this newsletter finds you well. No, for real I mean it. And the reason for that is over the course of the past few days, I decided it was time to move on from self-hosting Ghost, and instead switch to a managed hosting service. As Creativerly is growing, so are the costs to run it. Additionally, it became a burden to make sure that Ghost is always updated, SSH into my server, update packages, while focusing to not break anything (which happened a couple …
My name is Philipp and you are reading Creativerly, the internet corner where I unpack my musings, curate and write about noteworthy apps and software, and explore the latest trends in design and tech.
Hey and welcome to Creativerly 354 👋
I hope this newsletter finds you well. No, for real I mean it. And the reason for that is over the course of the past few days, I decided it was time to move on from self-hosting Ghost, and instead switch to a managed hosting service. As Creativerly is growing, so are the costs to run it. Additionally, it became a burden to make sure that Ghost is always updated, SSH into my server, update packages, while focusing to not break anything (which happened a couple of times actually).
Therefore, I was eyeing with Ghost’s managed hosting, Ghost Pro, for a couple of times. However, I could not justify the costs for the size of Creativerly. This is still just a side-project of mine, and while it does indeed generate some revenue, switching to Ghost Pro would have meant to pay a significant amount out of my own pocket.
Thankfully, I stumbled across Magic Pages by Jannis already a couple of months ago. Magic Pages handles all the Ghost hosting, so you can forget about server configurations and update anxieties. What is also lovely, every single month Magic Pages is offering a limited amount of Lifetime Options, limited in order to keep the whole project sustainable. I was lucky enough to grab a Lifetime plan, and now I am incredibly happy that Creativerly is powered not only by Ghost but also by Magic Pages.
During the migration I received the helping hands by Jannis, which made moving from my self-hosted Ghost version to Magic Pages incredibly smooth and streamlined. Now, I can focus just on writing and building Creativerly, without having to worry about any technical bits and pieces, and that already is a great relief.
On another note, I am also excited about the launch of the new website for Priductive, my small directory packed with privacy-focused, end-to-end encrypted, and open-source productivity apps. I rebuilt the site with Eleventy, added some filters, sorting, and a search to make it easier to browse through the directory. Thanks to Eleventy, the site is also super fast now. I will make some additional adjustments over the upcoming days, but enjoy browsing through the directory right away.
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Fresh Updates, news, and findings
Nook browser is the open-source, and private Arc alternative →
Do you remember Arc? The beloved browser which then got abandoned so The Browser Company can focus on an AI-first browser, a privacy-nightmare no-one asked for, which then got acquired by Atlassian, one of the biggest companies out there known for the pure enshittification of the apps they are building and acquiring? If you still want to enjoy Arc’s browsing experience, which was special, no doubt about that, you should check out Nook.
Nook is a new browser, open-source, and private, build by a small team. Nook incorporated a lot of Arc’s features, look, and feel. So, you definitely feel right at home. While Arc has been build with Chromium, Nook uses WebKit, the browser engine also Safari is using. However, it still supports Chrome extensions (although this feature is still in alpha). It also has some AI-powered features, but all of them are strictly opt-in, instead of opt-out, a pattern we increasingly see within other browsers in order to grab personal data.
You can download Nook for macOS. On its website, you can find a roadmap to stay up-do-date with the current focuses, and what features are planned next.
Mental Wealth
❯ Vibe Coding: Empowering and Imprisoning – “In case you haven’t been following the world of software development closely, it’s good to know that vibe coding — using LLM tools to assist with writing code — can help enable many people to create apps or software that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to make. This has led to an extraordinary rapid adoption curve amongst even experienced coders in many different disciplines within the world of coding. But there’s a very important threat posed by vibe coding that almost no one has been talking about, one that’s far more insidious and specific than just the risks and threats posted by AI or LLMs in general.”
❯ AI optimism is a class privilege – “Along the vast divide between AI optimists and pessimists, the main factor in determining which side you fall on may be where you see yourself in the future: above the effects of AI, or beneath them.”
❯ Returning to a Book and Finding Yourself – “For a number of reasons, I’ve been rereading a few books. It’s been enjoyable, rediscovering turns of phrase and plot twists and characters stuck so deeply in memory, you forget they were hiding out in all their clarity until prodded again—and once reawoken, it’s as if you’d first experienced them yesterday, not decades ago. Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, Roberto Calasso’s Cadmus and Harmony—and in the past couple of days, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time have all reminded me why I loved them in the first place.”
❯ How to Recover After Acting Against Your Own Values – “Recently, the mother of an eight-year-old girl told us the following story. Her daughter had come home from school distraught because she had joined other girls in “being mean” to a classmate. She hadn’t said anything herself, but she’d stood with the bullies and giggled while they ridiculed the classmate. Earlier, the girl had been on the receiving end of the bullies’ taunts, herself; now she was flirting with the power they held.”
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These are paid promotions or affiliate links to support Creativerly. If you are interested in putting your tool, product, or resource in front of over 2000 creative minds, consider advertising in Creativerly and book a sponsor or classified ad spot. Find all the important information at creativerly.com/advertise.
Appendix
❯ ICYMI
The corporate web is doomed, but the indieweb is thriving. The issue is though, the content which matters most gets buried in an ever-growing pool of AI slop. Traditional search engines like Google put AI-generated summaries and content, and ads first, authentic content gets pushed further down, hardly ever seen by potential visitors. Thankfully, there are already a bunch of alternative search engines, especially built to search through the indieweb, and surface personal websites, blogs, projects, and human writing. In my newest post Searching the indieweb: How to find real people, real projects, real writing in a sea of AI slop I gathered alternative search engines to browse through the indieweb.
❯ Quick Bits
- Why Tech Hype Is Rising and What Venture Capital Has to Do with It (Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves / Tech Policy Press)
- European cops shut down crypto mixing website that helped launder 1.3B euros (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch)
- The hidden Kenyan workers training China’s AI models (Damilare Dosunmu, Tessie Waithira / Rest of World)
- An AI model trained on prison phone calls now looks for planned crimes in those calls (James O’Donnell)
- Elon Musk’s X first to be fined under EU’s Digital Services Act (Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica)
- Apple design lead Alan Dye is heading to Meta (Ian Carlos Campbell / Engadget)
- You don’t need Sam Altman or his big, beautiful LLM (Douglas Rushkoff / Fast Company)
- Unpacking the Politics of the EU’s €120M Fine of Musk’s X (Justin Hendrix / Tech Policy Press)
- New York Times sues AI startup for ‘illegal’ copying of millions of articles (Nick Robins-Early / The Guardian)
- Cloudflare suffers second outage in as many months during routine maintenance (Richard Speed / The Register)
- It’s code red for ChatGPT (David Pierce / The Verge)
- Why Don’t Norwegians Hate Tesla Like the Rest of Europe Does? (Riccardo Piccolo / WIRED)
- Musk says new Tesla software allows texting and driving, which is illegal in most states (Sean O’Kane / TechCrunch)
- Block all AI browsers for the foreseeable future: Gartner (Simon Sharwood / The Register)
- With help from DOGE, RFK Jr.’s "Health Freedom" era delivers 243,000 more child deaths (Boing Boing / Jason Weisberger)
- The Solar Industry Is Begging Congress for Help With Trump (Jael Holzman / Heatmap News)
- Zillow nixes feature that helped home buyers assess climate risks (Oliver Milman / Mother Jones)
- Apple poaches Meta’s chief legal officer (Jon Keegan / Sherwood)
**Till next time! 👋**
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