Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
The Reader is the primary reason why I can keep being motivated to blog. Found many nice folks there, and some found me. It gives me likes and comments I didn’t have with my previous blog, which had better SEO and far more visitors.
The Reader link was rebranded from “Read” to an icon some months ago, which made it less recognizable. It’s now back as a O^O Reader. I’m thankful to the folks who put the text back. I hope more bloggers discover it this way because the tool is quickly improving.
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.
I joined WordCamp Sofia 2024 this weekend by responding to the call for organizers.
WordCamp Sofia will be held on 24th of November in Sofia Tech Park.
I’ve been out of touch with the local community for years. My last WordCamp where I was part of the team was WordCamp Europe 2018 in Belgrade. Wanted to do Varna 2019 but it was cancelled due to Covid, and never returned to the WordCamp work after that. Sadly, I even missed the WCEU in Athens, which is reachable by car from Sofia.
I’m thankful that the organizers welcomed me to the team. I hope I didn’t forget how this type of work is done and will be able to help. It’s been awhile.
Photo by Vladimir Petkov – Kaladan
Facebook just reminded me that WordCamp Europe in Sofia took place 10 years ago. Many great memories came back to me. As a member of the local team, I spent many hours per day in my car during the weeks leading up to the event, handling all sorts of errands—printing t-shirts, badges, stickers, sponsor deliveries, and such. I stepped in dog poop while collecting speakers from the airport. My car smelled terrible, and I had no idea why. Brrr!
These t-shirts were unusually good I shipped the same to either Seville or Vienna.
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.
Veselin.blog 