My first articles as a freelancer published last week! My title is now “contributing writer” – that is, a writer who doesn’t work for the site full-time. The last time I wrote a freelance article for a website was . . . well, never. My days of contributing to a publication that didn’t employ me full-time were before the World Wide Web.
In short, it’s been awhile.
It was a bit of a strange experience. I didn’t have the frequent back-and-forth with my co-workers about my articles right after they went live; feedback was mostly from strangers on social media.
Even odder: I no longer have Google Analytics access to see if my articles are getting a lot of traffic. I did indeed check traffic to my articles a fair amount when I was working fulltime. In my defense, I was looking at overall site traffic analytics pretty much daily anyway as part of my full-time data job. Although honestly I would have been looking at my own stats anyway, since I liked to know which of my articles were resonating. I’d rather put effort into writing about things people want to know!
I debated asking my editors how traffic was, but I decided to wait awhile. If the traffic is bad – which is certainly possible, especially as interest in business tech news dips for the holidays – I’ll just get discouraged and sad. If it’s good . . . what am I going to do with that information? It’s not like I need to know my next article topic to start working on tomorrow.
Instead, I promoted my articles as usual on social media, and . . . moved on. Writing tech articles is still very much a part of me! But my view of who I am has finally started to expand.
The articles
If of interest:
Analyze text using natural language with Claude for Google Sheets
Generative AI extensions like Claude for Sheets let you extract emails and phone numbers, categorize text, determine sentiment, and perform other tasks on your text right in Google Sheets — all without writing code.
FAQ: Getting started with Bluesky A microblogging social network spun out of Twitter, Bluesky offers easy onboarding, third-party feeds, decentralized blocking and labeling, and a free API. Here’s how to get started.
Create searchable Bluesky bookmarks with R
How to save and search all the Bluesky posts you’ve liked with the atrrr R package and use NotebookLM to ask natural language questions about those likes.
And, my new author bio at Computerworld.com:
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