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July 2026

📅 2026-07-31​

📝 Blog Posts​

  • InternetNZ 2026 board election candidate map: Sourced overview of all nine InternetNZ board candidates, organisational affiliations (including FSU connections), 2025 election context, STV voting guidance, and key dates — voting closes 10 August

📅 2026-07-23​

🛠️ Site Improvements​

  • Newsletter CTA attribution — stop polluting GA4 acquisition: Internal newsletter CTAs (announcement bar, docs footer, blog footer, in-post links) previously used ?utm_source=site&utm_medium=<surface>, which made GA4 start a fresh site / <surface> session on every click and fragmented the true acquisition source. Switched these to a non-utm ?ref=<surface> param that GA4 ignores; the /newsletter page maps ref back into the Beehiiv subscribe UTMs (with a legacy utm_medium fallback), so signup attribution is unchanged while GA4 source/medium reporting is no longer diluted
  • Tag off-site redirect interstitials for GA4 filtering: The by-design redirect pages (/tn → Discord, /newsletter/linkedin and the LinkedIn-inbound /newsletter hop → hosted Beehiiv form) bounce users off-site instantly, inflating (not set)/high-bounce landing metrics. Each now fires a redirect_interstitial GA4 event (event_category: redirect) and carries a Redirect — … page title, so they can be excluded from content engagement/bounce analysis by event, page title, or path

🔧 Bug Fixes​

  • Chromebook guide slug typo: Fixed the misspelled chomebook-terminal slug (missing r) — renamed to chromebook-terminal and added client-side redirects from both indexed typo paths (current guides/ slug and the retired Misc/ slug) to the corrected canonical URL, consolidating search authority onto one address

📅 2026-07-20​

🎨 Design Changes​

  • Social card refresh: Updated Open Graph / Twitter preview image (social-card.jpg) used for site-wide link sharing

📅 2026-07-15​

📚 Documentation Updates​

  • GLXTCH knowledge-lookup search-quality write-up: New engineer/AI doc covering why the Discord bot's Tavily-backed lookups returned wrong-country results for NZ queries, the classifier + heuristic root causes, the three-layer fix, and the two-form eval (live + deterministic replay) that guards against regressions

🛠️ Site Improvements​

  • TechNesians Discord redirect (/tn): Added static static/tn/index.html landing that fires a GA4 page_view (reading utm_* off the URL) then bounces to the TechNesians Discord invite after ~500ms
    • Single rotation point — the invite lives only in the DEST variable; /tn and any printed QR codes never change when the invite is rotated
    • noindex,nofollow; uses the site GA4 Measurement ID (G-DMRNTVGLRC)
    • Link: /tn

📅 2026-07-11​

🛠️ Site Improvements​

  • Discord domain verification: Added /.well-known/discord static file for HTTPS domain verification in Discord Connections
    • Served from website/static/.well-known/discord via Docusaurus build output

📅 2026-07-04​

🎨 Design Changes​

  • Newsletter copy refresh: Unified positioning across site — "the how vs the what" framing with Pasifika lens, Big Tech, and no-filter fortnightly cadence; context-specific openers on doc footers ("The docs are the how"), blog footers ("This essay"), and Start Here ("The guides"); pitch segments support bold/emphasis formatting via shared NewsletterPitch component
  • Doc footer newsletter CTA: Warm gold accent card with checkmark badge and button-style subscribe link; lead line reads "Enjoying the docs? Good."
  • Homepage cards: Larger section emojis; featured essay on the Analysis card is now a direct link to the flagship post
  • Announcement bar: Red brand background with white copy and high-contrast black subscribe link — replaces the default white bar on the dark theme

🛠️ Site Improvements​

  • Technical landing page (/docs/): Removed misleading “Recently Updated” block (file mtime, mostly stale study notes); fixed “Where to Start” pathway cards that 404’d (/docs/engineer, /docs/study); replaced Study pathway with AI Projects hub; moved Study and Books & Papers to the bottom of the docs sidebar

📅 2026-07-03​

🛠️ Site Improvements​

  • LinkedIn newsletter attribution fix: v2 iframe embed strips referrer/UTM — LinkedIn CTAs route to beehiiv-hosted subscribe page (bee.uncommonengineer.com/subscribe) where attribution is captured; /newsletter auto-redirects LinkedIn traffic with linkedin_hosted_redirect GA4 event; vanity path /newsletter/linkedin/ → medium=post
    • /newsletter embed forwards URL utm_medium from link hops (guide, banner, blog) before defaulting to newsletter-page
    • Granular mediums only: profile, featured, pinned, post, referral (referrer-only legacy links)
    • Canonical URLs in siteConstants.js → LINKEDIN_NEWSLETTER_URLS; frozen post CTAs in LINKEDIN_POST_CTA_STRINGS

🛠️ Site Improvements​

  • GEO / answer-engine findability (Task 8): AI crawlers explicitly allowed in robots.txt; build-time llms.txt curated index; BlogPosting/TechArticle JSON-LD on all blog posts and docs; Pacific AI & Data Sovereignty pillar hub with reciprocal cluster links

🛠️ Site Improvements​

  • Newsletter conversion funnel overhaul: Added site-wide announcement bar, embedded beehiiv forms on homepage and Start Here, new /newsletter landing page, and end-of-guide CTA on all docs pages — every link carries UTM attribution (banner, guide, home, start, newsletter-page)
    • Retired /subscribe via client-side redirect to /newsletter
    • Removed subscriber counts from homepage
    • Hero CTAs now route warm traffic to Start Here (/docs/) with secondary browse anchor
    • Link: Newsletter

🎨 Design Changes​

  • Homepage and docs footer refresh: Subtle newsletter CTA styling on doc footers; homepage hero social icons removed (footer retains Connect links); curated flagship essay and Start Here entry trio replace auto-latest picks
    • Proof strip (Block 8) intentionally deferred until copy is final
  • Homepage newsletter card: Compact beehiiv embed variant crops excess iframe padding so the signup row fits the card grid
  • Announcement bar copy: Replaced “Own your stack” line with newsletter positioning aligned to site copy (AI, power, tech — from inside the machine)

⚡ Performance Improvements​

  • 404 redirect map: Expanded client-side redirects for legacy /subscribe, /documentation/, and stale doc category paths
  • GA-derived 404 redirects: Mapped 111 broken paths from Apr–Jul 2026 analytics export (Substack /p/ slugs, nested hub URLs, old AWS naming, removed blog posts)
  • Count hygiene: Docs and blog counts now computed once at build time with rounded display values shared across homepage and Start Here

Enjoying the docs? Good.

The docs are the how. The newsletter is the what... as in, what the f*** — AI, power, Big Tech and the tech industry, through a Pasifika lens, from an engineer who's spent twenty-plus years working inside the machine. Fortnightly. No filter.

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