Category: WordPress

365 Days

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments

I challenged myself to do a 365-day blogging streak last year and managed to do it. I have to admit that I messed it up a few times mostly during trips, most recently 2 weeks ago in Agaete.

The blogging streak doesn’t work very well with timezone changes. You can be on a streak, come back home, and the streak is broken 5 times over the last 7 days. So I had to change post dates and slightly cheated to keep it going.

The Reader Council

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

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.

AI and Blaze

~ Veselin ~ 14 Comments

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.

It’s cool to care

~ Veselin ~ 6 Comments

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.