Why the moon? And a tip!
Cause time is weird. Check your phone.
Surprise last quarter frost exploding moon drop!
You may have noticed the full wolf moon reference in the first post. Astute readers may have seen a moon phase mention on the about page. So, what’s with moon stuff?
C) Sweet shirts.
D) Why not?
For real though, when I was thinking about how often to send ye olde missive here, none of the “traditional” cadences felt right.
Daily was too frequent (says the guy who has been blogging daily anyway since this thing launched).
Monthly was too infrequent.
Yeah, we get it, why not weekly like a normal person?
Short answer, I’m weird. Less short answer, weekly has never worked well for me. I’m not good at sticking to a rhythm where I do X on Monday, Y on Tuesday, etc. I chase too many rabbbits for that to last long.
The longer answer you probably don’t want and really don’t care about (marketing hack: there’s a whole ‘nother post below this one so keep scrolling!):
I rarely know what day of the week or month it is anymore (example: this email should have gone out at 8:41 as that was the “true” last quarter I guess, I didn’t remember it was today until I was falling asleep last night). I look at my calendar so I know what I need to work on for tomorrow and prepare for/do today, in addition to my never-ending, always-growing task list. I am not, despite what you probably think at this point, a paragon of productivity. (I’m more Oliver Burkeman than David Allen.)
Plus, when you decide on weekly, you then have to decide on which day of the week. And, as a data-driven marketer, that is a trap for all kinds of delay-encouraging tangents: which days and times are best for open rates, how do you optimize your Substack for SEO, is 3 b’s in rabbbits bad branding? Etc, etc.
I do weird projects like this one (and this one) as a counterpoint to my day job stuff. (I get it, the topics covered here make me a liar on this point, I just think way too much about this stuff and most clients are tired of listening to me talk.)
The Farmer’s Almanac turned me on to the idea of planting by the moon and the moon orbits on a regular (non-human tampered with) cycle. So why not plant seeds of thought and ideas on the moon’s cycle via an email newsletter?! (And blog. (Can’t imagine why clients are tired of listening to me.))
So, in conclusion, I wanted a regular posting schedule tied to a more natural cadence that offered some novelty in the 7x12 grid we do most stuff in.
Thank you for attending my TED Talk.
If you’re still here, some advice:
Use Your F@&k!n Phone
I clicked through a link to TechRepublic on my phone earlier and was greeted with a banner about some site changes. Cool.
I read the first line or two and scroll to get to the content. This message doesn’t pertain to me.
It doesn’t go anywhere.
The content scrolls behind it.
There will be no reading this article. (Yes, I could use “reader view”, that’s not the point.)
I’m assuming that at least 50% of their traffic comes from mobile, based on typical internet usage and site metrics. I’m being conservative with this estimate since it is a tech focused site and therefore might cater to an audience more likely to own and use laptops and desktops to consume content like this. Realistically, this could be more like 70%+.
Making a few more assumptions, this is how the banner reads to me:
As we work to improve this website for a minority percentage of users that actually login to and participate in our forums, pay for our premium version, or otherwise engage with our content in any way beyond reading it, some of our services will be unavailble from some time between now and the future. For those of you visiting on a mobile device, we don’t care enough about you to open this on our own phone to see what it looks like so just leave until we’re done and then come back to this article, if you remember. Or don’t. It’s whatever really. If you’re still reading this, we’ll thank you for things like “support” and “patience” and other emotions you probably aren’t feeling but this makes us feel good and we’ve already established we’re not too worreid about you. Also, we need some way to wrap this up.
Spoiler alert: it works fine on desktop.
If I’m half-remembering some graph I saw once right, there are more smartphones in use than there are people on the planet. Or adults. Or something along those lines. It really doesn’t matter. The point is, there are a whole lot of phones that connect to the internet being used by a whole lot of people.
I can’t say the same about more traditional computing devices.
Test your experience on mobile.
Google doesn’t even really care what your non-mobile site is like. Now, you may not use Google or care what it thinks (it’s a company/algorithm, it can’t really think anyway), but that should be a signal.
OPEN YOUR SITE/APP/EXPERIENCE/NEWSLETTER/PRODUCT/THING ON A PHONE.
TEST IT ON A PHONE.
DESIGN IT FOR PHONES.
I get it, if you (like me) work in the digital/internet realm, you probably have some nicely equipped piece of high technology with a comfortably-sized screen and/or one of 123,763 ways to use a jumbotron as an external display. If that describes you I have a nugget I’d like to share, you aren’t the “normal user”. You aren’t “average”.
When someone asks “what does the user want?”, if you know how to code or design stuff for other people to code or work for a company that caters to those people, they probably aren’t asking what you want. You aren’t “the user”.
So please, for the love of all things internet-connected, check what your thing looks like on your phone before you leave for the weekend.
(opens this site on phone to check before publishing)
Pro tip: if you want to go the extra mile, open it in a browser like Firefox Focus with a bunch of privacy features enabled and see what it’s like. I regularly find sites with navs and other features that are non-functional in this browser.
Double pro tip: you could probably stand to make your text bigger.
What else did I post about this week? Glad you asked!
Inflation, Zuck’s identity crisis, how to cultivate curiosity, putting users before lawyers, phrases that annoy me, and a weird take on follow your passion, maybe?