Update for the week ending on Friday, Jun 7, 2019

Is It Keto

Even though I officially stopped working on the site in March, that blog post attracted interesting suggestions for potentially high-payoff tweaks I could make to the site with not much effort.

• First, I made my “related product” cards a little prettier
• Then, I added these cards to the homepage so it wasn’t all text
• Finally, I added a “browse by category” feature
  • Potentially lucrative affiliate programs were rejecting me for “shallow content” and I suspect that it’s because they couldn’t figure out how to find all of my articles. Now they’re all discoverable via browse.
  • Browse by category main screen
  • Browse a single category
  • Breadcrumbs at the top of each post to make categories discoverable
  • Browse by category option on the homepage
  • Re-applied to Google AdSense and the Instacart Affiliate program with my newly browsable website:
    • Google AdSense: Rejected for “Valuable inventory: Under construction” (???)
    • Instacart: Declined (no reason given)
• I also broadened affiliate link generation
  • Previously, the page only included affiliate links that were tightly related (e.g., my Metamucil article exclusively shows links for buying Metamucil)
  • This was limiting because many foods are unavailable on Amazon and food is so inexpensive that it doesn’t generate much revenue
  • Now, I display keto-related kitchen products like food processors and steak knives in addition to the food itself. I’m interested to see how this affects my affiliate earnings.
• Wrote a script to identify stale affiliate links (products no longer in stock on Amazon)

mtlynch.io

• Started a new blog post about the value of task journaling
  • Also spec’ed out the cover image
• Started May retrospective (dragging on this)

What Got Done

• Added logic to pre-fetch the recent entries so that navigating to /recent still feels snappy even though the API endpoint serving it is kind of slow
• Started to add support for retroactively submitting a weekly entry even if you missed the midnight Friday deadline.
  • I got held up on a bug in bootstrap-vue that they quickly fixed, so I’m just waiting for a new package release
  • In the meantime you can work around this by editing any submitted entry and modifying the date in the URL to the previous Friday
• Investigated flakiness in my end-to-end tests
• Refactored and organized my Vue components a little bit so I don’t have 80 things in the same folder
• Reached out to a new user to ask about experience using the site
• Submitted What Got Done to Hacker News as a “Show HN” but it got no traction

New project research

Fell behind on this as I delved back into Is It Keto.

• Follow up email with writer who hasn’t yet respond to an interview request

Zestful

• Had a call with a potential customer
• Fixed a small bug in parsing ingredients like "2T of vanilla"
• Continued conversation with blogger interested in experimenting with Zestful

Misc

• Paid estimated taxes
• Got my accounting books up to date in Xero
• Got rid of two old air conditioners