Update for the week ending on Friday, May 1, 2020

Is It Keto

• Started ramping up auto-generated articles
  • I published 12 new articles, all fruits
    • Examples: plums, dates, apricots
  • Fruits are generally pretty easy because the answer is mostly that they’re not very keto-friendly, so the article doesn’t need a ton of detail.
  • Next week, I’m going to try tackling vegetables and some packaged foods.
• Added sorting to my category views
  • Users can now sort by keto rating or name
• Added commenting to articles using Commento
  • Commento’s pretty neat. Smooth install experience and they have low overhead on the page.
  • It’s my first experience using them, but I’ve been eyeing them for a while because they’re open source Go + Vue (like What Got Done), and they’re much more privacy friendly than Disqus.
• Spent a long time trying to figure out why the auto-suggest functionality didn’t work on Chrome Android
  • It turns out that Vue treats input as special from Chrome when it’s still “composing” (still underlined, the user hasn’t chosen an auto-complete suggestion from Android’s keyboard)
  • There are a ton of Github bug reports, and everyone kept on talking about workarounds, but they either never explained them or they didn’t work.
  • I finally discovered this workaround.
• Attempted to debug why I’d get random complete JS failures when browsing my site on Chrome Android
  • I seemed to have solved it by switching to a larger build machine, but that’s obviously not the root cause.
• Made homepage a little prettier on mobile
  • Before
  • After

mtlynch.io

• Published a follow-up to my post about Stripe’s user tracking
• Continued working on my post about digitizing videotapes
  • Finalized illustrations
  • Started working on a technical tutorial
  • Added more documentation to my accompanying Github repo for processing old home videos
• Switched to my own custom deploy image after the is-promise debacle broke my deploys (firebase-tools depended on is-promise).

Zestful

• Mysteriously, I received two independent inbound inquiries about enterprise pricing within three hours of each other
  • One seems serious, the other not so much
  • Scheduled a call next week with the serious one
• Trained a new machine learning model
  • It’s been a while since I’ve gone through this process, so I figured it’d be good to be fresh in my mind while discussing enterprise plans
  • Added documentation so I don’t have to recall everything from memory in the future.
• Updated USDA IDs that changed in the last database update
  • Why does the USDA change numeric IDs for foods between database updates?!?
• Changed the header font on the sales page because I felt like the old one looked too cartoonish
  • Before
  • After

What Got Done

• Fixed a bug in retrieving view counts
  • This is one of those bugs where I understand the fix, but I can’t understand how it ever worked in the first place.
• Fixed a corner case where What Got Done can leave you on an authenticated page that you can’t interact with
  • For example, you sign in to What Got Done, don’t visit for two weeks, then come back and your cookie is expired
  • What Got Done cached your login status in localStorage, but refreshes them as soon as you come back
  • The problem is that if What Got Done detects your token is no longer valid, it clears your cached login status, but left you on the page you were on
  • It wasn’t a security issue because the server still wouldn’t give you any data without a valid token, but it was just a confusing user experience
  • Fixed in #518
• Continued work on my long quest to add a WYSIWYG option for writing weekly updates

Portfolio Rebalancer

• Experimented with a new pricing model:
  • Old: $19/month, no free trial
  • New: $99/year, 7-day free trial
• Experimented with Google Ads
  • So far, paid traffic is terrible. Solidly 100% bounce rate (as opposed to 68% bounce rate from organic traffic)
  • Part of this might be that I’m getting 100% mobile visitors through paid traffic, so I adjusted my settings to not advertise on mobile because the site doesn’t look very good on phones yet.
• 1 new signup.

Beekeeping

• Did a hive inspection

Misc

• Talked more to MediaGoblin about setting up CI for their repo
  • You can’t see my reply because the Trac server ate it, but I successfully got the message to them through other channels
• Contributed a minor patch to Hugo