by Artemis | Sep 25, 2026 |
I was at a StrikeUP Canada virtual event today.
It was really good. I was also trying to choose one workshop idea from approximately 47 perfectly good possibilities. This'll become relevant shortly.
This was almost inconvenient, because I've had an unreasonable reaction to Skype and Zoom since the beginning of time. Something about those little boxes makes my nervous system behave as if it's been assigned a group project with no instructions and three people named Dave.
Still, I showed up. I took part. I learned things.
And afterward I was spent.
Not pleasantly tired. Not thoughtfully reflective. Just done.
Unfortunately, the rest of my life had failed to clear its calendar in honour of this development. I still had content to create, a website to finish buttoning up, and a virtual workshop to design.
The workshop won't be on Zoom.
It'll be in Rippily , which, for the way I want people to gather feels approximately one million times better. Yes, I’m biased. I also have reasons. That's another article for a day when my brain isn’t lying face-down on the carpet.
Here's the current problem: the content for the workshop is done.
I know what I want to teach. I feel good about it. The problem is the implementation.
Rippily gives me rooms, objects, movement, gathering spaces, activities and enough possibility to send an idea-generating brain directly into orbit. I'm limited only by my imagination and my knowledge, which sounds delightful until you remember that my imagination has no adult supervision.
We have the house. Now what do we do in it?
Claudio, who built Rippily and is very active in its community, has been talking with us about how people actually meet online.
Not which button starts the meeting. Not where the mute control is. How we meet.
He showed me Liberating Structures, a collection of ways to help more people participate instead of allowing every gathering to become one person talking while everybody else slowly becomes wallpaper.
The way I understood Claudio’s point was this: we have the house now. We need to decide how to use it.
Then he demonstrated a new pass-around feature with a cookie.
English isn’t his first language, so “tossing cookies” did not arrive with the same unfortunate digestive association it has for me. I briefly became twelve years old. Then I recovered enough to see the point.
One person gets the object. They respond, then pass it to someone else. It's familiar because groups have used versions of it in physical rooms forever.
I nearly wrote “in real life,” but somebody recently pointed out that our online connections are real life too.
Fair.
The exciting part is that so many forms of gathering, team-building and shared activity can now happen in a virtual room.
The dangerous part, for me, is also that so many forms of gathering, team-building and shared activity can now happen in a virtual room.
Possibility isn't a plan
When the platform can do almost anything, I immediately start trying to make the first workshop do almost everything.
Maybe people should move between rooms.
Maybe we should toss an ax.
Maybe there should be a collaborative wall.
Maybe a tiny experiment. Maybe pairs. Maybe groups. Maybe a mysterious object in the corner. Maybe a whole sequence based on one of the Liberating Structures. Maybe six of them. Maybe I should reinvent online gathering before lunch.
This isn't a shortage-of-ideas problem.
It's a container problem.
And that distinction matters, because most advice for getting unstuck tells us to generate options. Brainstorm. Explore. Make a mind map. Ask what else is possible.
Please don’t ask my ADHD brain what else is possible. We'll be here until Thursday.
What I need is a way to choose one idea without making the other ideas feel dead.
So this is the approach I'm going to use.
How I’m Going to Choose One Workshop Idea
1. One outcome
What's the one thing I want a participant to leave with?
Not seven insights. Not a vague sense that we had a nice time. One thing they can point to, use or try.
For this workshop, that might be one decision they have turned into a small rule, checklist, template or default - something that removes a little friction from their business after the workshop is over.
If an activity doesn't help create that outcome, it doesn't belong in the first version.
That doesn't mean it is a bad idea.
It means it's furniture for a different room.
2. One interaction
Which one Rippily interaction helps people reach that outcome?
Maybe it's the pass-around object. Maybe it's moving to a table that represents their choice. Maybe it's working quietly beside somebody before sharing anything aloud.
I get one main interaction for the first test.
It needs to do a job. It can't be there only because I'm delighted that the tool exists.
This is painful and rude, but probably necessary.
3. One test
The workshop doesn't need to prove that I've imagined the perfect virtual gathering.
It needs to answer a smaller question:
Does this interaction help these people get to the outcome?
That can be tested with a handful of people.
Afterward I can ask:
- Did people know what to do?
- Could they participate without being put on the spot?
- Did the activity help them make the thing they came to make?
- Where did their energy lift or disappear?
- What can I remove before I add anything?
That last question's doing important work.
Parking isn't murder
I also need somewhere safe for the other ideas to go.
Not a sprawling idea database with seventeen properties and a maintenance schedule. I know myself. That'd become a second workshop I have to design.
Just one note with three headings:
- Later in this workshop - useful after the basic version works
- A different gathering - good idea, wrong purpose
- Delightful but unnecessary - allowed to exist without becoming a task
Nothing has been deleted. Nothing has been betrayed. I'm simply refusing to make every good idea prove itself at the same event.
And what about the part where I'm already spent?
This is the bit productivity advice often skips.
I attended the event. I participated. My brain used the energy. The fact that I came away with ideas doesn't mean I'm required to implement all of them before the day is over.
Recovery isn't evidence that the event failed or that I'm lazy.
So the low-energy version of this plan is very small:
1. Write down the one outcome.
2. Circle one interaction worth testing.
3. Put the rest under one of the three parking-lot headings.
4. Stop.
No building the room tonight. No choosing fonts. No adding a second clever activity because the first one looks lonely.
The next step isn't to finish the entire workshop. It's to choose one workshop idea and test it.
The next step is to make the first test small enough that I can actually run it.
We have the house.
I don't have to furnish every room before I invite anyone through the door.
What idea are you afraid to park because parking it feels like killing it?
When the next one is ready, it will appear with my free virtual workshops for neurodivergent business owners
Until next time Friends...
by Artemis | Sep 21, 2026 |
t’s a beautiful fall day. There’s just enough chill in the air to make a walk sound lovely.
Instead of having a shower and heading outside before my 3 p.m. meeting, I’m sitting here at the computer while overwhelm creeps up behind me.
This is what ADHD business overwhelm can look like for me. It doesn’t always arrive with a crash. Sometimes it quietly settles in while I’m trying to do twelve perfectly reasonable things at the same time.
I’ve been completely revamping my website and, really, my entire business. I’m dealing with redirects, indexing problems and SEO issues. Rather than start over, I chose to keep my years of blogging. Some of it is unindexed while I decide what still belongs on the new site, but it’s mine. I’m not willing to throw it all away because starting fresh might be tidier.
At the same time, I’m preparing for my first serious social media campaign. I’m adding three new Canadian platforms, experimenting, watching the analytics and learning what works and what doesn’t.
Of course, that means writing a lot of content.
But I don’t want to churn out a pile of AI crap. Pardon the expression.
I want to share what I know, what I’ve learned and what I’m learning while I’m still in the middle of it. I want my content to come from somewhere real, even when I use AI to help me organize the words.
And one thing I’ve learned, often the hard way, is to watch for the signs.
I Recognized the Signs
The horsemen of the apocalypse, so to speak. Those familiar signs that I’m heading toward overwhelm and misdirection, the same path that has pulled me off course many times before.
I was standing on the balcony earlier, berating myself.
This is what you help people with! You had better smarten up and put your money where your mouth is!
You know, all those deeply motivating things we say to ourselves when we’re already struggling.
If I had a shame jar in my home, I would owe myself a lot of money.
Then my senses kicked in. I knew what was happening. More importantly, I’d noticed it in time to get myself back on course.
That matters.
The Win Is Noticing
The win isn’t that I never become overwhelmed. The win is recognizing the signs sooner and interrupting the pattern before it carries me too far off course.
Compared with everything I’ve already built, these last few steps aren’t enormous. If they feel this heavy, something else is going on.
I think I’m stressed both online and off. I’m overloaded. My brain is trying to carry too many open loops at once, and every unfinished thing is shouting for attention at the same volume.
This isn’t the moment to shame myself into working harder. It’s the moment to assess.
What’s taking energy? What’s adding pressure? What can wait? What am I treating as urgent simply because it’s making noise?
It’s time for an energy audit.
Breadcrumbs for Future Me
I need to tell myself where I left off and what I plan to do when I return. Every evening, and every time I walk away from my work, I need to leave breadcrumbs.
That way, if my low-energy self is the one who returns, she doesn’t have to reconstruct the entire forest before she can take one step.
A breadcrumb can be one sentence telling me what I finished, where to begin next or what can safely wait. That tiny note saves future me from reopening every mental tab just to get started.
As a neurodivergent business owner, I can’t expect my brain to hold every bit of context indefinitely. I need my business to hold some of it for me.
Five Tasks, Different Energy Levels
Now I’m going to choose five tasks that need to be addressed next.
It doesn’t have to be five. I like five because it gives me some choice, and choice helps me work with the energy I actually have.
The trick is to include tasks for different energy levels. One might require clear thinking. Another might be small and mechanical. One might take an hour, while another takes ten minutes.
I can choose the one that fits the brain and body I have at that moment.
Once those five are finished, I can stop and decide what comes next. I don’t need to map the entire journey today.
My reward is usually the satisfaction of knowing I completed them, but you do you. Stickers, chocolate, a cup of something lovely or dramatically crossing things off with a thick marker are all valid options.
So, I’m going to turn off the television that’s making noise in the background. I’m going to have a shower, take that walk and come back ready for my meeting and the next small thing.
And while I’ve been sitting here, writing down what I noticed and how I feel, I’ve completed another task on my list.
Funny how that works.
In the words of the famous fish Dory: just keep swimming.
But maybe leave yourself a few breadcrumbs along the way.
Until next time Friends...
by Artemis | Sep 19, 2026 |
I talk about low-energy days a lot. You don’t usually see much from me on those days, which makes sense. I’m generally busy having one.
So, if I’m going to put my money where my mouth is, here’s what today actually looked like: low energy, high frustration, and emotions with the volume turned up.
This is what a low-energy day running a business with ADHD looked like for me.
I started with the classic lie: How bad can it be? I’m capable of doing my adulting.
Apparently, pretty bad.
I was working on my website. There are still things to fix behind the scenes, and the indexing, SEO, and redirects have formed their own weather system. Every time I touched something, three more things seemed to need attention. I briefly considered hiding in the bathroom. Not as a strategy. More as a location.
Fine. Move on. What’s next on the list?
First I had to find the list.
The last thing I’d finished was the Lake Ontario Reset Retreat. That helped. It was fun to make, and I’m genuinely happy with how it turned out. On a day when my brain wanted to present everything as evidence of failure, there was a finished thing sitting right there.
Then I found my next task: email.
There were 17 emails. I dealt with all 17.
I’ve been working with a five-point plan for decisions and things that keep repeating in a business. I’m teaching it at my September 30 workshop, so I won’t unload all five points on you here. The relevant bit today is that I didn’t have to invent my approach to email from scratch while already frustrated.
Seventeen emails handled. HURRAH. I would like a small parade, but I’ll settle for acknowledging that I actually did the thing.
Then it was time for my weekly class on the tools available to me on the platform. They’re amazing, and more keep arriving. I’m also behind. Way behind. I’d caught up on some of the previous material, but not all of it.
Someone in the room seemed a little off, and my brain took its usual two-stop trip: I wonder if they’re okay? followed immediately by I hope I didn’t do something.
There was no evidence that I had. My nervous system did not seem interested in evidence.
The class began, and the first two things we needed depended on work from the previous class—the work I hadn’t finished. I could feel myself getting anxious and starting to kick myself for being behind.
So I left to catch up. Was that the right call? Honestly, time will tell. Maybe I’ve just shot myself in the foot. But staying in the room feeling worse wasn’t helping me learn, either.
I tried watching the video I needed to catch up on. My mind went everywhere except the video.
Okay. Enough. Walk away.
There’s now a pot of homemade beef-and-barley soup on, made with soup bones. I’ve had lunch. I’m going to spend a few hours working on a new sock pattern.
The website still needs work. I’m still behind in class. None of that vanished because I made soup, although this is excellent soup and I’m willing to give it a chance.
But I dealt with 17 emails. I noticed when frustration was making every decision harder. I stopped trying to force learning into a brain that wasn’t taking delivery today.
That’s part of what I mean when I say a business needs to work on low-energy days. I want the important things—including customer messages—to have a place to land without requiring me to become a fully charged, emotionally unbothered version of myself first. Some decisions need to be made ahead of time, so I’m not making every single one again on a day like this.
Today included 17 emails, lunch, homemade soup, and socks. Tomorrow I can find the list again.
Until next time friends...
by Artemis | Sep 8, 2026 |
My branding was woefully inconsistent.
The website worked, technically. It just looked as though five different people had built it—and unfortunately, all five were me.
Every version of my business was still in there somewhere. Different colours. Different fonts. Different images. Different ways of explaining what I do.
Nothing was necessarily terrible on its own. Together, it felt like a village where every building had been designed by someone who refused to attend the planning meeting.
It was time to rebuild.
Before the website came the brand
I could’ve started moving boxes around and choosing prettier colours. That would’ve been fun for approximately twenty minutes. Then I would’ve created another page that looked lovely but had no particular relationship with the rest of the website.
So I stopped and worked on the brand first.
And I mean really worked on it.
I wanted to understand more than which shade of teal belonged on a button. I wanted to know what TechAlchemy should feel like to the people who arrive here.
The people I work with are often neurodivergent founders, makers, and creative business owners. They know their work. They care deeply about what they’re building. They’re not incapable of using technology.
They’re usually dealing with technology that expects them to remember seventeen steps, six passwords, and one setting buried under a menu last seen in 2019.
I don’t want my website to add to that feeling.
I want it to feel welcoming. Interesting. A little playful. Knowledgeable without looming over anyone in a suit and demanding to know whether they’ve optimized their funnel.
Most importantly, I want people to understand that their brain isn’t the problem.
Once I had a brand profile that reflected all of that, I loved it.
Then I looked at the website again.
Well.
The buildings began attending planning meetings
I started with the main pages: the landing page, How I Help, The Village, and About Me.
Slowly, the website began to look like one place.
The typography matched. The colours belonged together. The images felt as though they came from the same slightly peculiar world. The words sounded more like me and less like something assembled from several years of business advice.
It wasn’t simply prettier.
It was easier to understand.
People could move from one page to another without wondering whether they’d accidentally wandered into a neighbouring business.
That’s one of the things I’ve come to appreciate about branding. It isn’t just decoration. A good brand removes decisions.
I don’t have to choose a new heading style every time I build a page. I don’t have to wonder whether a button should be teal, orange, lime green, or something I found while unsupervised in a colour picker.
The brand remembers those decisions for me.
That’s useful because I have other things to remember. Allegedly.
Then I reached the blog
I wanted the blog to match the rest of the site.
This seemed reasonable.
The blog became Notes from Artemis’s Worktable, which feels much more like what it actually is: things I’ve learned while trying to make technology, AI, fiber arts, creative work, and business coexist peacefully.
The design came together beautifully.
Then I discovered the editor had developed a hobby.
Whenever I published a post and began writing another one, the previous post turned up again.
Not in a useful “Here’s a clean template for your next article” way.
More in a “Hello, I’m your last blog post and I live here now” way.
Titles, excerpts, layouts, and content had become tangled together. Some posts had images. Some didn’t. Some had titles and excerpts but appeared to have misplaced the actual article.
This wasn’t a blogging system. It was a junk drawer with a publish button.
The website was making me remember too much
The more we untangled it, the clearer the real problem became.
The website relied on hidden rules.
Use this editor, except when you shouldn’t. Duplicate this, but not that. Change this setting first. Don’t touch the other one. Remember which parts belong to the post and which parts belong to the template.
I’m sure this system made perfect sense at some point.
Many questionable systems do.
The trouble is that a system isn’t very helpful if it only works when I remember all its private rituals.
That’s especially true on a low-energy day. Or a busy day. Or a perfectly ordinary Tuesday when my brain has decided that remembering where I put my tea is already enough responsibility.
The system should remember how it works so I don’t have to.
So that’s what we rebuilt.
The website template now handles the title, date, featured image, typography, spacing, and everything else that should remain consistent.
The ordinary WordPress editor holds the article.
When I start a new post, I get a blank page.
You wouldn’t think a blank page would feel like a technological achievement, but here we are.
Some things were missing
While fixing the publishing system, I discovered that some older articles were missing their content.
The titles were there. The excerpts were there. WordPress knew that something had once existed.
But when I checked the revisions, the article itself had been replaced by a Divi placeholder.
It was the website equivalent of finding a carefully labelled storage box with absolutely nothing inside it.
I could’ve kept digging.
I could’ve searched through older databases, hosting backups, cached versions, abandoned files, and every digital cupboard I’ve used in the past five years.
For a moment, I considered it.
Then I remembered that I have a business to run and a finite number of hours in which to run it.
I’m not going to spend time I don’t have chasing posts I may never recover.
Some might be worth rewriting. Others can stay wherever missing blog posts go when they wander off unsupervised.
I’d rather build something that works going forward.
What I’m keeping from all of this
The website finally feels like the business I’m building now—not every version of the business I’ve ever considered building.
The brand gives me a way to make decisions without starting from scratch each time.
The templates handle the repetitive parts.
The editor lets me write.
And I’ve been reminded that stopping is sometimes part of fixing a problem.
Not every old thing needs to be recovered. Not every mystery needs to be solved. Sometimes the useful choice is to close the backup screen, make another cup of tea, and carry on with a better system.
This post exists because I stopped trying to recover an old one and wrote something new instead.
That feels like a decent trade.
Until next time friends...
by Artemis | Mar 25, 2026 |
Sometimes the jobs that sink to the bottom of a business to-do list do not stay small.
They sit there quietly. They look harmless. They wait. Then one day they pop back up bigger, meaner, and wearing steel-toed boots.
That is what happened when I started cleaning up my website redesign.
I thought I was doing a simple round of website housekeeping on my WordPress site. Strip away the stuff I was not using. Tidy things up. Be responsible. Feel accomplished.
Cute.
Instead, I found myself staring at a bigger website audit than I had planned for, complete with WordPress SEO issues, accessibility problems, and a growing pile of image alt text that had clearly been waiting for its moment.
Then I found the real problem.
My Rank Math SEO plugin was gone.
Not disabled.
Not inactive.
Gone.
Deleted.
And that, my friends, is how a “quick cleanup” turned into a full SEO and accessibility audit.
It also became very obvious, very quickly, that SEO and accessibility overlap more than people often realize, especially when it comes to images, alt text, structure, and the kind of routine maintenance tasks that are easy to ignore until they stop being ignorable.
So yes. Two rabbit holes. Same crash site.
There is a particular kind of business task that looks minor right up until it bares its teeth.
Website cleanup is one of those tasks.
It sounds simple enough. Remove unused stuff. Update a few pages. Clear out old clutter. Maybe fix a broken thing or two. In theory, this is all very reasonable and grown-up.
In practice, website cleanup has a nasty habit of exposing the systems underneath.
You are not just tidying pages. You are finding old decisions. Old plugins. Old images. Old shortcuts. Bits of structure that made sense once and maybe do not now. You are opening drawers in the digital workshop and discovering that several of them are full of mystery screws.
That was the shape of this one.
I started with cleanup. I ended up looking at the bones of the site.
If you run a WordPress website, a solid SEO plugin is not a cute little extra. It is one of the main tools helping you manage the behind-the-scenes details that affect how your content is understood by search engines.
In my case, that tool is Rank Math.
Rank Math handles things like:
- SEO titles and meta descriptions
- schema markup
- XML sitemaps
- on-page content checks
- SEO audits and recommendations
In other words, it helps keep your site from wandering around the internet barefoot and confused.
There are alternatives, of course. Yoast SEO is another established option and plenty of people use it happily. This is not about starting a plugin cage match in the parking lot.
The point is simpler than that.
You need a working SEO system.
Without one, every post becomes more manual. Every page needs more checking. Every tiny publishing task turns into one more thing to remember while your brain is already juggling seventeen tabs, three ideas, and a snack you forgot you made.
That kind of systems untangling is also a big part of what I do through TechAlchemy. Sometimes the problem is not dramatic. Nothing is actively on fire. It is just quietly sitting there, making everything harder than it needs to be.
Which, frankly, is how a lot of website problems operate.
Once I reinstalled Rank Math and ran an SEO analysis, one issue jumped out almost immediately:
my images needed proper alt text and better accessibility attention.
And yes, that was a moment.
Because I have a lot of images.
A lot.
This is where the cleanup stopped being adorable and started becoming a job.
Image alt text is often treated like a tiny SEO task, but it is not just that. It is also part of making a website more accessible. Alt text helps search engines understand visual content, and it helps screen readers communicate meaningful images to people who cannot see them.
That overlap matters.
SEO is partly about clarity. Accessibility is also about clarity. Both benefit when your site is structured well, labeled clearly, and maintained like it belongs to actual human beings instead of search goblins.
That does not mean every image needs a dramatic little memoir attached to it. It means the images that matter need useful, accurate context.
And it means decorative images should be treated like decorative images, not padded with awkward filler text just because a plugin would like you to do busywork in its honor.
That is part of why website accessibility and SEO are so often connected in real-world site maintenance.
This is one of those website jobs that can get out of hand without making a sound.
You add images.
You redesign pages.
You swap out graphics.
You remove sections.
You change direction.
You pivot.
You pivot again because apparently we are doing that now.
Then one day you realize your media library has become a whole museum of “I’ll deal with that later.”
That was my moment.
Once I started looking at missing alt text and image descriptions, I realized this was not just about a few recent uploads. It was about years of content, old design choices, unused images, legacy clutter, and pages that needed a proper second look.
Could parts of this be automated? Maybe.
Could some tools speed it up? Probably.
But automation still does not know your site the way you do. It does not know which images are decorative, which ones are important, which ones are outdated, which ones are still in use, or which descriptions actually make sense in context.
It does not know what the image is doing on the page.
That part still needs a human brain.
Rude, but true.
Looking at accessibility more seriously made me realize something I should probably have named more clearly earlier:
website accessibility is not an optional gold star for extra-credit goodness.
It is part of basic site maintenance.
It is part of building a site that is more usable, more welcoming, and less frustrating for real people.
That includes alt text, yes, but also:
- clear structure
- readable text
- sensible headings
- useful link text
- navigation that makes sense
- images used thoughtfully
- content that is not making people work harder than necessary
Accessibility is not a fancy add-on for perfect websites. It is part of making your site function properly.
And once I started looking at that, I also found myself reviewing my Policies page and thinking more carefully about how the site is set up overall.
That is often how this goes.
You pull one thread, and suddenly the whole sweater wants to have a conversation.
If you are wondering whether Rank Math is the only option, no.
Rank Math is a strong choice if you want a feature-rich SEO plugin with built-in analysis, schema support, and a fairly broad toolset.
Yoast SEO is another solid option. It has been around for a long time, and plenty of WordPress site owners still prefer it.
Both can do the job.
The bigger mistake is not choosing the “wrong” one. The bigger mistake is running a WordPress site without a working SEO plugin at all.
That is when routine publishing starts turning into unpaid admin labor.
And most of us already have enough of that.
If your own “quick cleanup” has started growing teeth, these are some good places to look first.
1. Check your SEO plugin setup
Make sure your SEO plugin is actually installed, active, and doing the job you think it is doing.
Look at:
- SEO titles
- meta descriptions
- sitemap settings
- schema defaults
- basic post and page optimization
Do not assume it is all fine just because it used to be.
2. Review image alt text
Look at the images that are actually in use and ask:
- Is this image meaningful or decorative?
- Does it need alt text?
- Is the current alt text useful and accurate?
- Is this image even still supposed to be here?
This is where SEO and accessibility tend to collide in a very direct way.
3. Check your site structure and headings
Make sure pages have clear headings, readable sections, and a structure that helps both humans and search engines understand what is going on.
If a page feels messy to scan, there is a good chance it needs attention.
4. Review key pages and policies
Your main service pages, about page, contact page, and policies all deserve an occasional check.
Old wording, broken expectations, or neglected details can make a site feel less trustworthy than it actually is.
5. Look for outdated content and digital leftovers
Unused images, old design elements, stale pages, and half-retired ideas have a way of hanging around longer than they should.
A cleanup is a good time to ask what still belongs and what is just taking up shelf space.
6. Check internal links and site maintenance basics
Look at whether your important pages connect clearly to each other.
That includes links to your services, blog content, useful resources, calculators, and anything else people may genuinely need.
Good maintenance is not glamorous, but it does make a site easier to use.
What started as a redesign cleanup turned into a reminder I probably needed.
The jobs we ignore on our websites do not stay small.
A missing plugin does not stay small.
Weak SEO does not stay small.
Missing alt text does not stay small.
Accessibility gaps do not stay small.
They pile up quietly until one day you are not doing a quick cleanup anymore.
You are doing repairs.
That does not mean panic. It means pay attention.
Your website is not just a digital business card. It is your base of operations, your archive, your body of work, your communication hub, and often the clearest place people go to understand what you do.
For me, that includes everything from TechAlchemy to the blog, where I get to think out loud, share what I am learning, and occasionally admit when a “quick fix” has become a whole situation.
It also includes useful evergreen resources like my knitting and crochet calculators, which are exactly the sort of site tools that deserve clear structure, good labels, and regular maintenance.
A neglected website task is basically a slow leak in the hull.
You can ignore it for a while, but eventually you are not running a business anymore.
You are bailing water.
by Artemis | Mar 17, 2026 |
Earlier today I read a post that made my head spin.
Not because it was insightful. Not because it was brave. Mostly because I got to the end of it and thought, “Well... that certainly was a choice.”
For context, I was recently invited to beta test a new platform. Not the one where I saw the post, but another one that’s still not public yet.
I was genuinely honoured to be invited, and I took it seriously. I’ve been building spaces, trying features, testing all the bells and whistles, and sending bug reports when needed. In other words, actually beta testing.
Because that’s the job.
You don’t get invited in early just to play with the fun stuff and then act personally victimized when effort, cost, or responsibility enters the chat. You’re there to help shape something. To contribute. To notice what works, what doesn’t, and what might help make it better.
So when I read this very public, very long-winded post from someone basically saying, “I have no money, and here’s a detailed explanation that somehow removes all responsibility from me,” I had a serious moment.
Now listen, I understand that people struggle. I understand money can be tight. I understand not every offer is going to work for every person. That part is not the issue.
The issue is the decision to make that kind of complaint public in a way that showed absolutely no awareness of how it might affect other people, especially the person who built the platform.
And that’s where I hit the wall.
Because some things should be said in private. Some things should be handled with a little grace. And some things really do not need to be posted for the whole internet to witness like it’s a community theatre production of Poor Me: The Director’s Cut.
There is a huge difference between being disappointed and being reckless.
If something isn’t for you, fine. Ask questions. Decline politely. Walk away. Send a private message. Be an adult about it.
What you do not need to do is turn your frustration into a public performance and expect people not to notice the giant red flags flapping in the breeze.
What bothered me most is that the creator of this platform is a kind person. A genuinely thoughtful, generous, brilliant person.
The founder pricing offered to early supporters was more than fair. Honestly, it was generous. So seeing someone complain about that publicly, in a way that was clearly upsetting and unfair to the creator, did not sit right with me at all.
That part really stuck with me.
Because when someone is building something new and trying to do right by people, the least you can do is respond with a little maturity and basic decency.
It also made me think a bigger thought.
Have we gotten so used to entitlement that people don’t even recognize it anymore?
Because that post didn’t read like honesty to me. It read like poor judgment. It read like someone telling on themselves without realizing they were doing it. It read like one giant flashing sign that said, “If anything ever goes wrong, I can promise you it will not be my fault.”
And maybe that sounds harsh, but come on.
How people behave when they’re disappointed matters.
How they respond to generosity matters.
How they speak about others in public matters.
And if someone is showing you, in real time, how they handle friction, why would you ignore that?
That’s not being judgy. That’s pattern recognition.
Not every frustration needs a public audience.
Not every opinion needs a “post” button.
And not every inside thought needs to be released into the wild wearing no supervision and bad shoes.
There is a difference between being honest and being unprofessional.
There is a difference between being real and being careless.
And there is definitely a difference between having a private concern and creating a public mess.
At the end of the day, people can post whatever they want. That doesn’t mean it’s wise, professional, or free from consequences.
If you choose to publicly showcase your lack of judgment, don’t be surprised when people take notes. Because they will.
Some thoughts are indoor thoughts, and some posts are basically a free trial of future problems.
Until next time friends...
