Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
There’s a new initiative by Dave Martin, WordPress.com’s lead of the new Social team called Reader Council. The Reader Council will be a p2 blog dedicated to hearing the community requests for Reader improvements and bugfixes. I’m very happy that this is happening and I hope it makes the Reader better, and our blogs cooler.
The AI ad generator outperformed me in Blaze.
Blaze is WordPress.com’s internal ad system (Tools > Advertising). I decided to give it a try and ran 2 campaigns. The first was for a random Book post with an AI generated ad, and the second was for one of my best long reads with a hand-crafted ad copy.
The AI-generated one had a $0.3 CPC compared to $0.56 for my post. I also got fewer impressions.
The CPC that I achieved was okay but my blog is not a business, and doesn’t deserve it yet.
I walked today alone with my thoughts. I was upset about something and was thinking about ways to resolve the problem. After 30-ish minutes of walking, I saw this reassuring sign. It says “It’s cool to care”.
It is indeed cool to care, but it is not cool to act under the influence of a strong emotion. When a person is in the red, the most productive thing they can do is usually to cool down and get out of the red.
I’m sure the poster wasn’t there to reassure people who care but nevertheless, it helped me get out of the red and move to the orange.
Here’s this generated with an AI duck who doesn’t care.
In case you’ve missed it, the image block now has AI. This duck is the first time I have used it.
Just dropping a few recommendations of blogs I ❤️ and deserve following:
Old Structures Engineering Journal – folks who post things about old buildings. I don’t know why I enjoy reading this stuff, but I do.
War and Peas – cartoons.
Last week I somehow saved a post instead of publishing it and my 4-month blogging streak ended. A couple of days later, I published the missing post with a date from the past, and the blogging streak resumed a day later. This sounds more like a bug than a feature but it worked for me.
Veselin.blog 