71 Photos and videos
Following AI suggestions to optimize my blog's SEO, I was told to 'noindex' a lot of pages. It really hurt to watch more and more pages get tagged as noindex.
Surprisingly, though, the quality of indexing and keywords noticeably went up, bumping up my impressions and visits.Looks like having more pages indexed isn't always better; we also need to focus on indexing quality. It seems things are moving in the right direction.
Blog：daolanx.me/
#SEO #GSC
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Since getting freelance gigs is tough right now, I might as well work on some projects to hone my skills.
This time, I'm building a dashboard tailored for small teams. I've actually built quite a few dashboards before, but now, with the help of AI, I can truly approach it from a product perspective.
I’m thinking deeply about what small teams actually need—managing finances, users, and tasks—it has to be streamlined, practical, and hit the sweet spot.
Building this is not only good technical practice but also a great way to build up my product sense. Plus, it might come in handy in the future, so it's definitely killing multiple birds with one stone.
repo: github.com/daolanx/compass-c…
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AI is radically changing software development, but the way I see it, working in software right now is a lot like traditional craftsmanship—it actually lets people be more human.
Honestly, if you look at toolmakers, they aren't doing everything completely by hand either. Blacksmiths use equipment like die-casting machines and grinders to save a ton of physical energy and time. That frees people up to care about two main things:
1. Quality and Taste: AI can take care of checking all the measurable data, but in a diverse world, there’s no single 'best'—just what each person thinks is best. That's where human empathy and experience really shine.
2. Value and Meaning: By cutting down on the grind of the actual building process, we can focus more on what really matters—value and meaning.
At the end of the day, as long as the final users of a product are humans, humans will always have the unique edge of taste, empathy, and figuring out what’s actually valuable.
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Having adjusted my mindset, I believe this is how it should be handled:
1. Face reality head-on without running away, even if it hurts.
2. Strive to enhance my experience and capabilities. Instead of wasting time on endless bidding wars and mindlessly refreshing job boards, the early focus should be on improving technical skills and finding more cost-effective solutions tailored to specific scenarios.
3. "There is only one true heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it." Romain Rolland actually said this, and Steve Jobs expressed something similar.
In the early days of programming, job opportunities were abundant, but we spent a tremendous amount of time wrestling with syntax and implementation details.
Today, while AI has reduced the number of jobs, it also empowers programmers—relying on their core technical literacy—to quickly integrate upstream and downstream processes, giving us the opportunity to build complete, end-to-end solutions. We should become better at leveraging AI rather than fearing it.
The competition on Upwork is insanely brutal—way beyond what I imagined!
Usually, you have to boost your proposal just to get noticed. I finally managed to get two boosted proposals viewed and even started a dialogue, but then it went completely radio silent. After upgrading to a premium membership, the data I saw was terrifying: not only is the client interviewing and comparing over a dozen freelancers, but the other applicants are mostly platform veterans with top-tier ratings. It’s incredibly unfriendly to newcomers 😂.
The reason I’m sticking with it is that, instead of just blindly guessing on my own, this platform offers the most authentic, real-world glimpse into trending tech stacks. It’s a highly accurate way to track market demands and upskill myself.
Plus, I need to keep a healthy mindset. Landing a gig always involves a bit of luck, but what really matters is your actual capability. As your skills keep improving, your reliance on luck diminishes. It’s just like playing a Soulslike game: when you finally beat the boss, it’s not because the boss got nerfed or the game got easier—it’s because you have grown stronger.
#Upwork #Freelancer
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The competition on Upwork is insanely brutal—way beyond what I imagined!
Usually, you have to boost your proposal just to get noticed. I finally managed to get two boosted proposals viewed and even started a dialogue, but then it went completely radio silent. After upgrading to a premium membership, the data I saw was terrifying: not only is the client interviewing and comparing over a dozen freelancers, but the other applicants are mostly platform veterans with top-tier ratings. It’s incredibly unfriendly to newcomers 😂.
The reason I’m sticking with it is that, instead of just blindly guessing on my own, this platform offers the most authentic, real-world glimpse into trending tech stacks. It’s a highly accurate way to track market demands and upskill myself.
Plus, I need to keep a healthy mindset. Landing a gig always involves a bit of luck, but what really matters is your actual capability. As your skills keep improving, your reliance on luck diminishes. It’s just like playing a Soulslike game: when you finally beat the boss, it’s not because the boss got nerfed or the game got easier—it’s because you have grown stronger.
#Upwork #Freelancer
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Setting up a free custom domain email using Resend Cloudflare Gmail. It works well!
Here are my steps: daolanx.me/en/posts/post-22/
#Resend #Cloudflare
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These days, we’re used to relying on search engines or AI to jump from site to site. But there are still sites out there connecting the old-school way through lists and webrings, letting you hop directly between them. Some of the sites you'll find inside are really interesting:
1️⃣ Fediring (fediring.net/)
A webring dedicated to residents of the Fediverse (Mastodon, etc.). It connects a group of independent bloggers who love decentralized social media and sharing authentic, active content.
2️⃣ Geekring (geekring.net/)
Use a webring like it’s 1993!" A completely non-commercial space for all kinds of tech nerds and geeks. It features fun, quirky, and highly personal indie sites. To support vintage computers (like the Commodore 64), it even defaults to HTTP access. Real old-school vibes.
3️⃣ Hotline Webring (hotlinewebring.club/)
Full of 90s nostalgia (the AOL and Ask Jeeves era). This one gathers "wild" websites with strong personalities and unique aesthetics. It has a high concentration of Neocities and Nekoweb sites, so expect lots of creative pixel art and retro homepages.
#Fediring #Geekring #HotlineWebring
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Using Stitch, Next.js, and OpenNext to Build a Personal Homepage (Part II)
Continued optimizing the page for performance and SEO, boosting the Lighthouse score from 70 to 90 !
While the AI-generated code functioned properly for basic features, the initial Lighthouse score was only around 70 . After a series of fine-tuning, it finally reached 90 . Key improvements include:
- ⚡️Performance: Focused on LCP optimization, reducing the size of resources like fonts and npm packages, and eliminating unnecessary animation rendering.
- 🔍SEO: Fixed support items including canonical and hreflang tags.
- 🛠Deployment: Noted critical scripts configurations required for OpenNext.
Below are the detailed development and optimization logs:
- Doc: daolanx.me/en/posts/post-21/
- Live Demo: daolanx.com/
#OpenNext
Just built my new personal homepage! Prototyped with Stitch, polished it up, and deployed it on Cloudflare Workers using OpenNext.
It seamlessly combines my portfolio and personal blog, complete with theme and language switching. Honestly, I think it turned out pretty great!
Bringing it all together took a bit of AI, a touch of luck, and a whole lot of patience.
- Live Demo: daolanx.com/
- Repo: github.com/daolanx/home/tree…
#Stitch #Cloudflare #OpenNext
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From an SEO perspective,www.your-domain.com
and your-domain.com are treated as two separate sites, which leads to link equity dilution and potential penalties for Duplicate Content. The conventional approach is to configure a CNAME record in DNS and handle 301 redirects via application middleware or Nginx server rules.
However, the recommended practice on Cloudflare is much more elegant:
1️⃣ DNS Layer: Add an A record for www, pointing to 192.0.2.1 (a reserved "black hole" IP).
2️⃣ Proxy Layer: Ensure it is Proxied (the orange cloud ☁️).
3️⃣ Rules Layer: Set up a Redirect Rule using: concat("your-domain.com", http.request.uri.path).
Because the 'orange cloud' intercepts traffic and forces it to Cloudflare's edge nodes, the redirect rule executes right at the edge. The request never even reaches your origin server, resulting in zero computational cost, zero quota consumption, and near-instant 301 responses."
#Cloudflare #DNS #SEO
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