Someone on Threads asked whatever happened to blogging. I thought about it and remembered how after Richard Wright wrote Black Boy and Native Son (among many other works) he learned about haiku and wrote several thousand of his own. That’s kind of what I feel like has happened with blogging in light of social media. You’re able to more or less do the same thing as a place like Blogger or WordPress, but it’s more concise and direct. There’s engagement and dialogue (for better or for worse) With blogging, that still exists, but it’s somehow on a different scale. Some will write comments, while others will write blog entries of their own responding to that original post.
I’ve had a few ideas for longer form entries like I used to, but I simply haven’t had the energy to do any deep dives of late. So, I’m writing this instead.
I’ve decided to part ways with Evernote. I’ve been using them since 2009 back when I had a Windows phone. Back when I had multiple devices from different companies, it was great. A note started on one could be finished on another and they’d all sync up and talk to each other.
Since 11 SEP 22 SUN, I’ve been using Evernote as a journal. I was having some shoulder pain that was severely limiting my normal range of motion, so I used it to keep track of my pain as well as note when I took any Ibuprofen. As time went on, I used it to document when I took my medications, namely my antidepressants and mood stabilizer. The latter makes me a little drowzy, so I have to be careful when I take it. If it’s too early, I fall asleep on the couch and disrupt my normal sleep schedule. If it’s too late, it’s harder to get up in the morning.
In addition to keeping tabs on my medication, it was also a general sort of journal, sporadically documenting the various goings-on in my life, sometimes acting as an aid for me to track my depressive cycles and try to rationalize what I was feeling at the time. It’s easily the longest journal I’ve ever kept (not counting Blogger, which has no real regularity to it) and Evernote was great for updating it. Then, it stopped being great.
Despite only being text, updating it became extremely tedious and slow, especially using the mobile app. The desktop app wasn’t much better. According to Evernote, the file is only a few hundred kilobytes, a far cry from the 200MB max size they say a note can be on a subscription plan. I wrote in to their customer support, but received no reply. Couple this with their price hike (70 to 130USD) at the start of the year for me, and it’s a lot of goodwill down the drain. As for what I was paying for, their scratchpad was finicky to use, not always syncing between devices, and other times when it would sync, it would double-paste whatever was written from one device to another. This eventually got fixed, but sometimes it would still slip. Their worst offense in all this, really, was their pushing of AI features. You bump up the price, struggle to handle a 200kb text file, barely handle syncing on the scratchpad, and now you’re telling me to use the AI features? Finish this candy bar before you go unwrapping another. It’s just poor management, chasing trends rather than focusing on and leaning into your strengths.
Meanwhile, Apple Notes seems to have gotten better, if only by comparison. Before, I always felt like it was fighting me. I’d use it on occasion, but I simply didn’t like using it. Now, though, it seems so much more polished, keeping in line with the Apple fan adage, “It just works.” Besides, now that all of my devices are Apple, I don’t need Evernote’s best feature, which was being a middleman among the devices. In fact, I wrote the draft for this entry in Apple Notes rather than Evernote. I don't plan on migrating my stuff from Evernote on any grand scale, only as needed. As an experiment, I started my meds journal as a new document, then copied and pasted the old one into the new space. No lag on the desktop, but we'll see how it holds up in morning with the mobile app. If Notes has similar issues with large text files, at least I'm not paying an annual subscription to have it not work.
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