Geek
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The Hero’s Journey and Other Storytelling Frameworks
I’ve been thinking about storytelling frameworks lately. Not because I’m a comms professor or a copywriting guru, but because I keep using a handful of them without realising it, and I got curious about what else was out there. Back in 2016, after 1,000 days at Telstra, I wrote a post framing that chapter through… Continue reading
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126 Crons and Counting: How We Automated Almost Everything (And What Broke Along the Way)
Last night, while I slept, 126 crons ran. Morning stats pulled at 6 AM. Hub updates queued for eight separate topic hubs. Social share suggestions drafted for the AM window. A Google Search Console audit checked for drops. Broken links scanned across the whole site. The newsletter stats synced. The RAG index rebuilt. And at… Continue reading
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1337 Posts FTW!
SmallBizAI.au hit 1,337 posts today. If you know, you know. 1337 is leet speak. The hacker number. The one you hit when you’ve been at something long enough that the universe decides to reward you with a nerdy milestone instead of a round one. I’ll take it. I’ve been running SmallBizAI.au since March 2026, AI… Continue reading
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My Love Letter to Code Snippets in WordPress
In June 2012, an Australian developer named Shea Bunge got annoyed at their web host. It wouldn’t let them edit their theme files directly. So they built a plugin to work around it: a simple interface for adding PHP to WordPress without touching functions.php. They called it Code Snippets. Each snippet gets a name, a toggle, and a text… Continue reading
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I Spent a Weekend Archiving 23 Years of My Digital Life. Here’s What I Found.
1/ Why My digital memory is scattered across platforms I don’t fully control. Posts, tweets, connections, and half-finished drafts spread across twenty-three years of being online as a tech person in Australia, and some of it is already gone. I started blogging in May 2003 on Radio UserLand, back when blogging was still a weird… Continue reading
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I Built My Daughter an SMS Bot to Sell Her Car
Emma is moving to London next week. She finished her Masters of Data Science, joined AWS, built her career. Now she’s off. London, new job, new chapter. We’re proud of her. Before she goes, she needs to sell her car. A 2014 Fiat 500c, light blue, convertible. Emma’s brief: put a sign on the car… Continue reading
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Exploring AI Recognition: The Multiple Frank Arrigos
I first saw this on X, first Matt Barrie, then Jeremy Howard and I thought, good enough for those legends, well good enough from me. The site was called intheweights.com. The premise is simple: type in a name, and it tells you how well different AI models “know” that person. I typed in my name. It… Continue reading
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The Day I Took the Site Down
On May 15, 500 errors caused smallbizai.au to go offline for 2.5 hours due to conflicting plugins and an AI assistant’s misjudgment. Recovery relied on WordPress’s emergency mode feature. Continue reading
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I Gave My AI Agent a Footy Job
Over 40 years as a devoted St Kilda member, I share my experience launching SaintsFooty—a Telegram channel delivering timely updates and coverage. Despite a minor bug, the project worked! Continue reading
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When Your IT Guy Retires: What Australian SMBs Need to Know About the MSP Crisis
A succession crisis looms in Australian IT services as aging managed service providers (MSPs) near retirement, forcing small businesses to confront challenges in IT management and the need for cloud migration and automation. Continue reading