Reporting from The Verge on layoffs at CNET:

“Under Red Ventures, former CNET employees say the venerated publication’s focus increasingly became winning Google searches by prioritizing SEO. On these highly trafficked articles, the company crams in lucrative affiliate marketing ads for things like loans or credit cards, cashing in every time a reader signs up.”

I worked for a company similar to this after they acquired the more traditional online news play I started at. They weren’t so much a heavily operationalized affiliate marketing company as they were into something euphemistically referred to as “performance marketing” and more recognizably called “lead generation.”

Basically, they came in did a good thing (dropped all the display advertising), and then filled the resulting holes in the page with widgets and internal ads for whitepapers, ebooks, and insurance cost estimators. They had a set of verticals including:

• home construction
• home health care
• auto insurance
• for-profit education
• home finance
• IT (the vertical I landed in)

The basic model was:

• They buy up actual content plays that had tried to make a go of monetizing regular editorial content, or popular blogs in a given space, that have good SEO and good placement.
• You, the consumer, search for “enterprise routers” or whatever topic
• You find a piece of straight editorial content (e.g. a review, an howto article, whatever)
• You see an ad for a free ebook about enterprise networking you can download in exchange for your email
• The progressive data gathering kicks in: You see an offer to get access to the “complete library of ebooks” in exchange for information about your company, its size, and your purchasing authority
• A Cisco, Juniper, or Ubiquiti orders up a list of verified leads, which is sold to them for some amount of money per lead.

These same people lost a massive lawsuit from 16 state attorneys general over their deceptive use of the gibill.com domain, which used little “what kind of degree would you like to get with your benefits” widgets to steer veterans to for-profit educational outfits and their notoriously bad outcomes.

It wasn’t the best 18 months of my career.

Affiliate marketing is a little more direct, but both models are obsessed with SEO for obvious reasons. I did pay a visit to CNET to see if I could spot what the article is talking about and it looked more on the “affiliate” end than the “lead-gen” end.

This part from the Verge’s coverage elicited a bitter laugh:

“Former staff recounted multiple instances in which CNET employees were pressured to change their coverage of companies that advertised with Red Ventures — a flagrant violation of journalistic ethics that put CNET’s editorial independence at serious risk.”

Yeah, no. Let’s rewrite for accuracy:

“Former staff recounted multiple instances in which CNET employees were pressured to change their coverage of companies that advertised with Red Ventures — a flagrant violation of journalistic ethics that put destroyed CNET’s editorial independence at serious risk.”

Playdate cometh-ish

I pre-ordered a Playdate July of ‘21, putting me early in Group 4. It looks like I might get it a few months shy of the second anniversary of that order.

It’s funny, because over the past few years I’ve gone through this evolution:

1. I love video games.
2. I love the idea of loving video games but I don’t seem to play much lately.
3. I like some video games, but not many and it seems like there are fewer of them all the time.
4. It’s possible I actually don’t like video games and won’t admit this to myself.
5. It’s not me that changed, it’s the games.
6. No, I just don’t like video games.
7. I miss loving video games, but I still don’t like them.
8. I miss playing video games, but what’s the point: Even games on the Switch are overdone.
9. I would like to try video games again, especially the big, overdone ones.
10. I like video games quite a bit.

I ordered the Playdate as my thoughts darted around between stages 4 and 7, and the lingering thinking around stage “7” caused me to think a few times over the past two years “maybe I should just cancel my order.”

But I remember seeing that Group 3 was shipping in the past several months and forgetting what group I was even in and feeling briefly excited, then really let down that I am in Group 4. Where the Playdate is concerned, I am at stage 10, and am very excited that I might have the thing around my birthday.

Oh, looks like they’re having some sort of media event next week, too, to announce an online store?

Tech industry resentment

Nieman again today with a dyspeptic take on tech industry hype and blame-shifting. I have my share of gripes about tech hucksters, and there is nothing more fun than going back to turn-of-the-millennium WIRED to jeer, but the example of “push” as an over-hyped nothing-burger is weird to me. The ad-driven, surveillance capitalism model WIRED argued was inevitable most definitely did find us. Is “the web” dead? No, but there’s a reason people like JWZ are constantly reminding us that apps are not the web.

Generally on board with the idea that the tech people anti-regulation mantra is not great, though. It would have served the thesis better to steer clear of the WIRED-bashing this time, or just stuck to the odiousness of the Californian Ideology generally.

Language scuffles

Two things this week from George Packer and Katha Pollitt:

• “The Moral Case Against Euphemism”
• “Let Kids Read Roald Dahl’s Books the Way He Wrote Them”

Packer’s piece is more … reactionary? … and sort of late to the “grousing about inclusive language” party. I read it, but it’s an exhausting discussion with examples on the usual spectrum from “yes, George, ‘urban’ is in fact a bad euphemism we’d do well to not use the way these guides recommend we not use it” to “yes, their reasons for not using ‘field work’ are not great, but ‘practicum’ has been in common use for a long while.”

I guess Packer annoys me: I’ve read some version of his essay at least once every five years my entire adult life, and have come to view it the way I came to view the William Proxmire Golden Fleece Award. There is something reductive and showy about the whole exercise. If you’re the type of reader to pause for even a second on one of his examples, you realize it’s not even a very good exercise in nut-picking.

How the sausage is made

My first little digest post practice was a way to keep up a blog during the work day: I’d just open up a BBEdit file and start dropping stuff in during little breaks. I created a sort of dead man’s switch situation, where a cron job would launch an AppleScript that grabbed the file at 17:30 and posted it for me.

I brought the practice with me, only over a week timeline, when I joined the Puppet marketing team. The content was always aimed at “practitioners who like Puppet,” but I had an informal rule about having only one item that promoted the company’s interests: My belief was that marketing teams should give more value – help, interesting stuff to read – than they take. The posts did really well: They usually led the week in page views and stickiness, and people clicked through on the promotional stuff.

Most recently I’ve brought the format back because I’m still trying to suss out how I want blogging to work for me generally.

I’ve got this blog, I’ve got my omg.lol weekly update blog, and I’ve got my micro.blog. I’m beginning to chafe with the latter: It has great cross-posting capabilities, but I don’t feel like a match for the culture on that service. If I’m going to have a hosted provider of some sort, I want them to be more of a common carrier than a boutique. I think micro.blog is great, but:

• It feels opinionated in a way that doesn’t work for me.
• It feels like the feature requests I see go by are often filtered through some opinions about What Went Wrong with Social Media that are reactive guesses.
• It’s a little confusing in a needless way. There’s a muddiness in the language in the interface.

I guess it just feels suspended between the conflicting imperatives of making a mass tool – or at least wanting to build a mass tool – and preferring to remain in a very high-concept place where ideas don’t have to cohere into well articulated, concrete outcomes for users. I’m sure happy users of the service will disagree.

Anyhow, there is a standing todo on my writing topics list that’s “figure out your content strategy,” which maybe sounds cold-blooded and businessy for a sole proprietor blog, but I am not doing this entirely for the entertainment value. “Digest posts” are a good way to keep from swamping your feed, post output, and archives, and to prevent burying the stuff you’d like people to find without having to carve out a whole special hole to stick business stuff in.

But there’s also just a good unto its own in doing the thing. It’s daily writing, and it’s framed in a way that makes it low stakes. If some of these things were their own entries, I’d feel compelled to have a more concrete thesis, more detailed reasoning, citations, etc. That is not, in my experience, a good way to maintain the part of writing that is less about craft and more about motion.

So, the workflow to make these every day is:

• I spend the first 30 minutes of the day over tea and my RSS reader. I bookmark anything of passing interest if something about it stirs a comment in me.
• When I go upstairs to sit down and do day planning, I pop open a terminal and run my Hugo posting script. I added a switch that puts the right tags and title in place for me, and it opens a Sublime window if I just run hpost --daily.
• I drop in any initial headings I’ve thought of and put those in the post summary just to remind me.

Then it’s just a question of pecking at it during the day. I try to do Pomodoros for my important stuff, so I’ll type in a few words here and there during the five-minute breaks, or if I’m caught up for the day I might give the thing a full Pomodoro of its own. I give myself an hour for lunch, and often spend a chunk of that time filling things in or expanding on stuff.

That’s about it. When I’m at a point in the day where I can’t see putting anything more into it, I ship it. I’m working with Hugo and a Git-based publishing pipeline, so if there are multiple WIP commits I squash them and push them up just to make it easier to eyeball non-content changes. I’m using Mastofeed to automate the posting process.

I’d like more descriptive Masto posts, so I’m considering cloning the RSS feed I use to make them: Mastofeed provides template tokens for title and link, so the description/summary goes missing. I might just do it by hand, for that matter.

Design notes

The past few days I’ve been making little improvements to the CSS of my theme here. The last time I did much with CSS was over ten years ago, and it was mostly in the context of using Bootstrap for personal projects. Responsive design practices – and the CSS features that support them – are new to me as something I’d code for myself vs. relying on a framework, but I like being able to do stuff like progressively hide the visual clutter that works fine on a laptop or big tablet but not great on a phone. I started by taking a lot away, and now I’m adding it back.

It’s beginning to weigh on me a little, though:

I’ve written a Hugo shortcode to make tags link to interesting things, and that’s portable. I’ve done some stuff to drive the front page “Picture of the Week” feature that is probably generalizable to another theme. I’ve done a few other things that are probably better done some other way.

But basically I’m layering stuff on top of a theme that was done more as a PoC for how to use SimpleCSS with Hugo out of the box and that plainly was not meant to carry some kinds of weight. So with all my little amendments and changes, my override directory is running about 25% of the total size of the original theme, for something where I started by thinking “I’ll just swap in my preferred palette.”

That’s not necessarily a bad thing in a “well, many websites are CSS of Theseus propositions” sense, but I know my own limitations. I’ve also gotten better with Hugo over the past couple of months and would probably understand what some more complex themes are trying to do, rather than bouncing off of them and going primitivist.

Probably time to make a branch and see how badly stuff blows up when I lay on another theme.

I, gamer

The fun part of the PS4 has just been catching up on whatever has been going on in console gaming over the past while. I remember being a very avid gamer once upon a time – during the PS1 and PS2 era – then I was just really into the Nintendo DS, and then I didn’t play much anymore. My 3DS never saw a lot of use, and I don’t get much time in on the Switch. It has always felt like games on the Switch are too big to just pick up and put down between meetings, but too small to really invest discretionary time in.

So I got a PlayStationPlus membership and I’ve been taking advantage of how cheap everything I’m curious about is.

I took a detour into the Doom remake, and I am not sure if it’s okay to say so, but I find it hilarious.

I remember Doom from when it was the slightly grittier evolution of Wolfenstein 3D, and it always to me to be solid execution with an excellent vibe. The remastered version I downloaded to my PlayStation is also pretty well executed, and the vibe benefits from the graphical advancements.

The first time I killed a demon by running up to it, tearing its arm off and beating it until it spilled ammo and health like an infernal piñata made me howl.

The whole thing is sort of hilarious that way. You end up in hell fighting demons to a grinding, thrashing soundtrack, there are demonic runes everywhere, bodies, flames, blood all over the place. It’s just hilarious.

I, handyman

I just fixed our garage door sensor for the third time in fourteen years. I predicted it would go differently this time the last time I fixed it, because the recurring problem is a pair of wires leading to the sensor that periodically get snagged by … something — a yard tool, a piece of bicycle, a carelessly plopped laundry basket — and one of them breaks.

Whoever built the house and installed the garage door provided as much wire as was needed to connect the sensor, then covered the wiring in dryall. If there is any spare wiring available up there in the wall somewhere, it is smashed in place behind the drywall and I’ve tugged at it as hard as I dare lest I break off the remaining bits coming out of the wall.

So I’ve known for five years now that there was no more wire coming out of the wall … that the next break would be the one where I’d have to splice more wire in, because there wasn’t enough left to cover the space from the wall to the sensor and still get it wrapped around the post.

Anyhow, this time Gorilla Tape is involved in making it all sit there more snugly and less likely to be snagged and I can close the garage door without standing there holding the button. That has created a surprising amount of friction where taking my bike anywhere is concerned.

I had the time to do this today because the half of the house that hosts all our networking infrastructure and my office sits shrouded in darkness. The breaker for that circuit failed last week as the winter storm was happening. It didn’t fail in the “it just blew, you can reset it” kind of way, but in the “fails and doesn’t even seem to have blown and you can’t even trip the test switch” kind of way.

I felt it coming – the UPS for all the infrastructure was making the click it makes when the supply is getting frisky, but never tripped over into “I’m running on battery power now.” When everything did finally go dark I went down to the garage, couldn’t seen a tripped breaker, flipped the two candidates (both are labeled the same thing and I’ve never taken the time to label them “front” and “back”) and went back upstairs to … nothing.

Then eight hours later it all lit up again. Then failed again.

Same symptoms: Not tripped, can’t test.

I called the home warranty company and they promised a 24 hour window for a contractor, but by then Portland was covered in ice. They finally texted this morning, asked for availability, and are on their way.

For now the router, Wi-Fi, and switch are running off of a long extension cord running out of my office, down the hall and into an outlet on the not-blown upstairs circuit.

The last time we had an electrical problem like this was maybe 10 years ago during a pair of 100-degree-plus days. A light fixture that was a little heavy pulled itself free of a softened nylon anchor and the clash of wires tripped the arc breaker (on the same circuit that’s bothering me now). That was when we learned that whoever wired the house had run the range hood in the kitchen downstairs into the same circuit as the two bedrooms and bathroom on the other, upstairs end of the house.

“Some Russian, probably,” opined the contractor who came to have a look.

I destroyed an Airport Extreme that week by bringing it down from my office and putting it the only place it could rest near the only open outlet, in a window.

I say “destroyed,” but what really happened was that the Ethernet port stopped working.

The “Progress!” note in all this is that during the period where all the networking and Wi-Fi was down, we just flipped to the 5G hotspots our phones provide and carried on with our business. It doesn’t outperform the new MOCA/EdgeRouter/CenturyLink setup, but it is faster than our Xfinity/Eero-as-wireless-only-mesh setup was.

Last time, I would imagine all we had was 3G, and there was no “all you can eat.” I remember because we burned through our cap, decided to go to the mall for the air conditioning, and my attempt to transfer some spending money to Ben using the mobile bank page took five minutes because AT&T dealt with data hogs by dropping them to EDGE speeds until the month was over.

TickTick

I’m giving TickTick a try this week. Stuff I like about it:

• The interface looks as simple or busy as I want it to be. Something I appreciate about Things 3 is its ability to fall back to “just a nice todo list app” during those times when I don’t feel like messing with it.
• It has a habit tracker that integrates with the rest of the app. If you set up a habit and it’s due, it turns up in the “Today” list, or you can interact with it in its own “habits” area.
• It has a built-in Pomodoro timer. That method works pretty well for me (using it now!) and it’s more than a superficial integration: You can specify what on your list is getting the time.

Stuff I’d rather it not:

Everything is framed as “how productive” you are. I’m just tired of that language.

I am tired of that language because after a couple of years of watching people burn out and then thrash around trying to figure out what was “wrong” with them, I came to the conclusion that as much as the gentrification of mental illness annoys the living hell out of me, it doesn’t outrage me the way the modern workplace turns workers on themselves (and deepens that gentrification feedback loop, because the only help you’re going to get as you thrash around, worrying that you’re falling behind your peers in the company’s “performance culture,” is a non-ironic invitation to take your woes to the EAP).

And, more importantly, not every single thing you want to do has to be “productive.” It is not, for instance, a matter of “productivity” to remind myself that I want to read a chapter of a book every day, or learn how to make my own mayonnaise, or take a picture every day.

Anyhow, it’s pretty easily ignored if you stay away from the reporting, which I intend to. I just want something more ergonomically sound than Apple’s Reminders, and the purpose-built habit and pomodoro stuff rolls a number of things into one context.

Tailscale

I spent a while not bothering to play with tech stuff, so when I heard about Tailscale I never did anything with it. Once I got my new network stuff going I decided to start doing more with my Synology NAS just because it’d be easier to network and secure with a decent router in place.

Poking around the VPN packages available for it I saw the Tailscale app and thought “oh, that.” In just a few minutes I had all my stuff added to it and talking to each other, and a whole set of problems I was willing to create for myself went away.

I haven’t done any testing with it out in the world yet, but internally it integrates fine with my internal DNS. It’s so smooth.

Design fiddling

I spent a little time fiddling with site design today, too, just to make the front page a little more lively. I took a swing at some responsive design, as well. It’s crude, but the front page is way more “just the essentials” on a phone, were someone to wander out to it.