Work stuff

Rocked up to an event 35 minutes early. Thought it started at 2pm, when it’s 2:30pm… Not my finest moment.

Aussie Broadband just increased the cost of my NBN plan. After almost five years, I think it’s time to shop around again.

I finally hit the payment threshold for Google Adsense on BTTR, so I have switched it off. It’s a rubbish product that breaks the site way too frequently.

Ads are definitely going to be a part of monetisation moving forward, but I haven’t quite worked out how just yet.

I probably should have thought about just how uninspired i would feel about working today after taking last week off and with Xmas this coming Thursday.

No amount of coffee can help me focus today.

I’m writing about Ghost’s ActivityPub integration, and I realised that deep down I really just want it to be more like Micro.Blog.

I just spent (checks watch) an hour trying to setup a Windows review laptop.

One hour. Just to get to log in and use the device.

Maybe I should start charging an hourly rate to review Windows laptops. Such a ridiculous waste of time.

Things that are driving me crazy this week: People opining Apple is failing with its AI initiatives, when everyone else’s AI solutions are terrible for the quality of the Internet, small business and the environment.

Give me a shit Siri over the crap Google plans to unleash every day of the week.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed and depressed by Google’s I/O announcements overnight. It’s so hard to see a way to succeed as an individual publisher in the face of Google’s strategy to vacuum up all the content and repurposing it to keep people on Google.

Real first world problem here, I know, but it’s still frustrating that after two years of doing BTTR (not to mention the 15 years of tech journalism before that), there are still so many PR companies not communicating with me. Makes it hard to write about those products…

I am all over the place this week. It’s Friday and I haven’t done any planning for the weekly BTTR newsletter, which sends this afternoon.

What should I write about?

The other day I thought I’d try to create a single-page portfolio site to help with the job hunt/freelancing. Got version 1 up and running by leveraging a free template.

I didn’t realise I was going to have to learn React and Javascript to make any meaningful changes, though.

I don’t have a deep understanding of code, but I know enough to mess around. That makes it really easy to mess things up.

Today, I was messing things up in a big way, but then I worked out why. I felt good for solving the problem, but bad that I’d made such a basic, basic error.

Last full working week before Xmas, so all the HR teams are closing the loop and sending job application rejection letters today.

My inbox is brutal.

Today I fell right down a rabbit hole of settings and emails and optimisations and subscription tiers and managed to achieve very little, though hopefully setting things up well for the future...

Today as I was pulling together my entries for the ITJourno Awards, I discovered that across TikTok and YouTube I’ve had over 100,000 views.

Obvs the numbers don’t reflect people actually watching my vids, but it was still cool to realise that I’ve passed that milestone.

I’ve been stewing on this piece for months. Trying to find the right approach to talk about how I feel about Gizmodo Australia disappearing. Because it is such a personal thing for me: I put so much of myself into that website, and now it’s gone. https://www.bttr.reviews/gizmodo-australia-eulogy/

I’m looking for a privacy-friendly (no cookies, at the very least) alternative to Adsense that I don’t have to pay for as a publisher.

I can’t find anything that fits the description… Anyone have any ideas?