Michael Lynch @michael@m.mtlynch.io

Here's what I got done this week:
* Led sprint planning for next TinyPilot release
* Searched for internal company mailing list solutions
* Discovered the joy of home document digitization
https://whatgotdone.com/michael/2021-06-11

I published the little Ansible role I'm using to set up the heartbeat server with @cronhubio https://github.com/mtlynch/ansible-role-heartbeat

I looked into other uptime monitoring solutions that were more geared toward "heartbeat monitoring" (e.g. UptimeRobot) because I wasn't sure if Cronhub would be the best fit, but Cronhub had a much better documentation and a UI that showed me more of what I needed to know.

I have two employees who go into TinyPilot's office for a few hours each evening to ship out new orders. The Internet went out at the office Monday, but I didn't find out until an employee got there and couldn't work.

Now, I have @cronhubio to proactively alert me of outages.

The VGA to HDMI adaptors I sell for TinyPilot come with a 3.5 mm stereo cable that I don't use, so I always set them aside. Now I have 150 of them and have no idea what to do.

Suggestions for anywhere I can sell or donate them? I want to get rid of them all in one shot.

Here's what I got done this week:
* Terminated a trial hire with a freelance dev
* Reviewed PRs to download a disk image from URL
* Published my May retrospective
https://whatgotdone.com/michael/2021-06-04

My May retrospective is on the front page of Hacker News!

Thanks to @tnorthcutt for submitting it. I never expect my retrospectives to gain any traction on HN, but this one seems like it piqued people's interest.

In May, TinyPilot made $39k in sales, but that was barely enough to cover costs.

In my latest retrospective, I talk about how @getajobmike's advice helped me reevaluate my business and how I need to embrace my role as a manager. https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2021/06/

Eight years ago, I registered a separate domain name with wildcard email forwarding to my real email. When a form asks for my email address, I put in [service][at]mythrowawaydomain

When someone shares my email for spam, I can identify where the spammers got my email and block it
---
RT @deliberatecoder
@AlexBMorse I donated to your congressional campaign, but it looks like that resulted in my email address being shared with unrela…
https://twitter.com/deliberatecoder/status/1399701680334254082

This weekend, I published a Python package for Zestful, my ingredient parsing API.

I always wanted to, but I didn't know how to publish to PyPI. I learned earlier this year for another project, so it suddenly occurred to me that I could finally do it. https://pypi.org/project/zestful-parse-ingredient/

This is not super magical, but my experience with SEO is that results always take months and multiple tries, and you never know why it finally worked. It was nice to have something in SEO just work the way I expected the first time I try.

Last Thursday, I migrated the blog post over to the TinyPilot site. I set the rel="canonical" tag on the http://mtlynch.io version to point to the http://tinypilotkvm.com version.

I Googled "tinypilot" today, and it worked! Google only shows the migrated version.

I had a SEO experience this week that went better than expected.

The issue was that the original blog post I wrote about TinyPilot (on my personal blog) was often the top result when users Google "tinypilot"

But I wanted visitors to go directly to the TinyPilot website.

@hund I think FilePizza on Firefox would work. If you're willing to self-host a send instance, you can do that too. Some other options here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27053811