Update for the week ending on Friday, Jul 19, 2019

Zestful

Completed the USDA-matching feature
- Now, when Zestful parses an ingredient, it attempts to associate it with the best-match entry in the USDA food database.
- The weakness now is coverage. I estimate that I can match about 61.25% of requests, weighted by frequency. I’d like to get this to 80+% coverage, but there’s a long tail of possible ingredients, so each 5% gain in coverage is about an order of magnitude harder than the previous.
Reached out to active customers to let them know the USDA-matching feature went live
Reached out to a potential customer from Github
Fixed a few hundred mislabeled training examples

Had calls with two potential customers to interview them about status-sharing tools at their companies
Sent cold emails to 6 potential customers requesting interviews
Sent personalized welcome emails to five new users
Upgraded to Cypress 3.4.0

Added AdSense display ads
- I tried applying for AdSense twice before and kept getting rejected for strange reasons like “insufficient content” and “site under construction.”
- I haven’t changed much since my last rejection, so I figured I’d just try again and it was approved!
I’m liking AdSense much more than Ezoic
- I think the difference is having a sense of control. I can choose which ads to exclude and where to place them.
Averaging around $3/day ($1.05 RPM) from AdSense, but it’s only been four days, so we’ll see where it settles.
What it looks like
- Desktop
- Mobile
Fixed some layout issues that cropped up with the new ad elements on the page
Fixed some internal links that were either 404’ing or 301’ing
Found a blogger who recently cited Is It Keto, so I reached out to see if I could make Is It Keto more helpful for her blog
Upgraded to Cypress 3.4.0

Continued writing my post about hiring writers
- Got lots of writers’ block this week because it’s much longer than my typical post
Did my millionth reconfiguration of my Jekyll setup
- Builds were taking 20-30s (i.e., every time I made an edit, it took ~30s to re-render the page)
- New setup is: Jekyll runs on a VM that uses an SSD for storage. The VM exposes the blog directory as a Samba share, which I mount from Windows so that I can edit my posts comfortably in VS Code.

Checked in on my bees’ progress filling their honey supers
- They’re building a little bit wacky off the frames but otherwise seem to be making good progress
Tasted my bees’ honey for the first time (it was amazing)

Helped my dad move
Got solar panels!
- Everything is set up, but I’m still awaiting final inspection before they can flip everything on
Finally fixed the hinges on my porch screen door that had been broken for months