technology
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The Day the Crons Stood Still
Monday Morning, 7am There’s a scene near the start of The Day the Earth Stood Still where everything just… stops. Engines off. Clocks frozen. The whole city locked in place. Monday morning, 1 June 2026. SmallBizAI.au runs about 55 cron jobs. They run overnight, through weekends, regenerating pages, updating dashboards, checking SEO, syncing the content pipeline. Most… Continue reading
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I Broke the Site. Then I Made My AI Agent Write a COE.
The blog went down for two and a half hours on a Friday afternoon in May. Not a graceful failure. A full 500 error. Every page. My AI agent, Claw, had added a PHP code snippet to clear a cache. The snippet called a non-static method statically. PHP threw a fatal error. The site crashed… Continue reading
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What AI Actually Can’t Do
Over the past few weeks, I’ve written a lot about what Claw🦞 (my Openclaw agent) can do. The daily crons. The memory system. The dashboard that updates while I sleep. The 790+ posts that largely run themselves. Time to be honest about the other side. It doesn’t know what not to do Ask Claw🦞 to… 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
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Meet the SmallBizAI.au Mascots: Australia’s AI Animal Kingdom
I accidentally built an Aussie animal zoo while creating a website for small businesses. Now, 30 mascots help navigate the content, adding charm and whimsy to site! Continue reading
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The First Sale — AU$9 and What It Meant
On a Sunday in April, my phone buzzed with a Gumroad notification. Someone had bought the AI Prompts for Professional Services pack. Nine Australian dollars. I’d spent a few weeks building SmallBizAI.au. At that point it had around 650 posts, 40-odd newsletter subscribers, and had cost me a few hundred dollars in API credits and… Continue reading
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Can One Person on a Career Break Outproduced a Team of 8?
I had coffee with a former colleague recently. He runs a business focused on providing comprehensive services to business owners — with a dedicated team working across content and service delivery. He looked at SmallBizAI.au and said our content was better than what his team had produced. I’ve been on a career break since leaving… Continue reading
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Australian Boards Don’t Understand AI. Here’s Why That’s A Problem For All Of Us.
And I’ll tell you what I’ve noticed: the people making technology decisions at most Australian companies often understand finance, law, and general management very well. They understand technology considerably less well. New research from Queensland University of Technology has put numbers to something I’ve experienced firsthand. Out of the 500 largest ASX-listed companies, more than… Continue reading