May 2025 Work Log (Patreon)

Hello again! Here's everything I worked on during the month of May, exclusively for Patreon supporters.

Link Cleaner

I'm making more progress on the big Link Cleaner update, which will probably be done sometime in June. The new home page design is mostly done, after a lot of spacing and layout tweaks. It's shaping up to be a great experience on both desktop and mobile devices, with and without physical keyboards.

I'm also bringing back the link history feature that was removed earlier this year, but in a much different way. The old version wasn't used much, and since it saved cleaned links in the browser storage, it could be a minor privacy risk if another person used the same browser.

The new version doesn't save data at all: once you close or refresh the page, it's gone forever. It also only applies to the home page, not bulk mode.

I have a few more updates for the bulk mode and settings pages, then some general testing across different devices, and the Link Cleaner update will be ready to roll out.

Tech Tales

It's been a while since another Tech Tales! The new episode in May covered Swatch's Internet Time and the ill-fated Sputnik 99 satellite, with guest Cody Toombs once again joining me.

You can listen to the latest episode on YouTube or with your favorite podcast app. Also, Cody is going to be ramping up videos on his own YouTube channel, so subscribe to that too!

The Spacebar

I published three articles on The Spacebar in May:

The worst tech event ever: looking back at Google I/O 2024

Moonbase Alpha: That time NASA made a meme video game

This is every Ubuntu Linux default wallpaper

You can subscribe to The Spacebar as an email newsletter, or follow new posts through the RSS feed, Google News, the Mastodon account, or Bluesky.

This was also the first full month of using Grow by Mediavine advertisements instead of Google AdSense. I can't really do a proper before-and-after comparison because the ad units and density are different, but Mediavine is working pretty well and making more money than AdSense.

Other Stuff

This month I migrated my eight web domains from Hover to Porkbun, and I really should have done that a long time ago. Hover had higher domain fees than Porkbun and some other registrars, and $5/yr fees for each forwarded email address, which really added up for my eight domains. I was paying around $240/yr in total for Hover, and now I'm at around $140/yr for Porkbun.

Some of my web apps had a brief outage during the migration, so if you noticed Link Cleaner or another one of my projects not working for a bit, that was why.