Blogging

September has come and gone. Autumn is in full swing now and everyone is prepping for the winter. September was a busy month for me, both personally and professionally. I started traveling more again and wrote up a storm on my Medium account. I finally hit a nerve over there and have been experiencing viral follower growth as well as decent earnings. These earnings aren’t big enough to replace my day job earnings, more like extra money for beer. The subjects of my viral articles are climate change and the stock market. I’ve been pretty heavy on the climate change ones because gloom and doom (fear) seem to drive a lot of traffic. ...

I shut Neural Market Trends down on the last day of August thinking it was going to be for good. Things have changed on my end and I’m thinking of restarting this site. I’m thinking of moving back to my roots and building a community. Why? Because of something I saw a few days ago. I was on a work call the other day and a prospect was sharing his screen. I noticed he had a bookmark to the popular HackerNoon site. ...

Work from home (WFH) is here to stay if you’re lucky and fight for it. I keep hearing from my customers that more and more companies are starting to reopen and call back employees to the office, except many are not coming back! That’s music to my ears! After dealing with the sudden pandemic shutdowns, juggling work-home duties, and dealing with the isolation, the majority of American workers powered through this hell. We did it. We kept our companies afloat and not just survived, but thrived. I don’t know about your work environment, but we accelerated our productivity over the last year. ...

In April 2020 my blog was barely alive. I had moved to Hugo from Pelican and ignored any kind of SEO optimization for it. I thought it was stupid and that the best content would win. Little did I know that my content wasn’t even being found! So after thinking about it for a few short minutes, I decided to dive back into SEO and figure out how to bring my blog back from the dead. ...

This tutorial is not about porting Hugo posts to the Ghost format but instead it’s about how I got a custom domain, CDN, and removed the :80 port from a new Ghost install. First off, setting up the machine on AWS Lightsail is pretty easy. It was as simple as selecting the Ghost install and taking the cheapest instance possible. I think the cost is like $3.50 a month, which is pretty sweet IMHO. ...

There was a short time when at a previous Startup I moved out of Sales and into Marketing. I had to produce a lot targeted content in a niche market and that’s how I earned my living. A lot of the content I created ended up on the company’s blog, video library, or community boards so I considered myself a Professional Blogger back then. Now that I’m back in Sales and I Blog here for fun, I consider myself a writer and a Semi-Professional Blogger now. ...

I’m going to start this post with a big helping of gratitude. I’m so grateful to the 1000’s of readers that helped me get into the field of Data Science and Machine Learning. I was a part-time blogger that turned my passion into a full-time gig in the AI Startup world. This post is my way of paying it forward to you. Read below if you want to learn how to make money blogging. ...

I was on Twitter one day and I came across an announcement that HackerNoon had joined the micropayment world and gotten an infusion of cash from Coil.com. That’s a cool $1 million to implement a new method of web monetization. Breaking: We Raised $1M From @Coil, Will Stream Micropayments from Readers to Writers via the Browserhttps://t.co/iquXY9j2Pm pic.twitter.com/bHRfhaenna — HackerNoon | Learn Any Technology (@hackernoon) June 10, 2020 I think the current web monetizaztion model is broken and power is concentrated into too many corporate silos. Granted Coil.com is one of those corporate silos too but they’re building their model on a proposed webmonetization W3C standard, which is a great first start to ’leveling’ the playing field for content creators. ...

As software continues to eat the world, we’re slowly becoming slaves to subscriptions. I don’t remember when I started thinking about this but it must’ve come up when I looked at our family budget. I realized that we as a family and I, are paying so much on monthly or yearly subscriptions that it just gives me great pause. What am I paying? On the surface, it doesn’t look like much but then you dig deeper and you realize you are hooked! Here are some subscriptions in our household: ...

If you’ve been reading this blog for some time you’d know that I like to try different CMS’s. I made some mistakes over the years and I transferred my posts between different CMS. This ended up killing a lot of my backlinks, but that’s ok. I ended up settling on using Markdown to write my posts (love it) and a static CMS generator. Originally I used Pelican and it was pretty good. It was based on Python and had some really neat ways to slice and dice your posts, leverage SEO, and do cool things with it. ...