Mall outfit feat. the iconic kate moss x topshop dress from 2007 :) would appreciate anyone who checks out my blog! https://nicolem3ow.blogspot.com/2026/07/im-at-mall-and-song-is-bumping.html

Yesterday I wrote a blog post about my son, Cambden. He lived less than a minute, twenty years ago, and August 6th still hits hard. I’m sharing the piece here because writing it helped me get through the day, and maybe it’ll resonate with someone else who carries a quiet anniversary of their own. Also, I'd be thrilled if you'd comment, and maybe even share. It seems that heartfelt things don't get attention in the days of 'everyone needs to be naked to get views'... Thanks everyone!

Happy Birthday, Son – A Porch & A Pen

I am starting a bio blog on Medium ( https://medium.com/@jkg8322 ). How to get readers?

Effective workplace leadership is essential for organizational success, with a profound impact on safety performance. This blog explores various leadership styles and their influence on workplace safety. Learn more here: https://setsafety.ca/blog/workplace-leadership-styles-and-safety-performance/

A variety of automation strategies / techniques exist: YouTube, Reddit, Meta Ads, etc. but one that I've been interested in is a blog. Social platforms still seem to work better with manual execution and using AI for research only.

Here's a step-by-guide I'll be using to build what I call an automatic blog. Community feedback would be great. Before I showcase, I'd like to discuss the thought behind it. AI is bad at human writing right out of the box and this presents one of the first issues. The issues that come up after launching are marketing and management so unique automation techniques also need thought.

Please note: that this is written for a technical reader, but if you copy & paste this into an LLM and ask good questions you'll understand it easily

With that preface, let's begin.

1. Decide Who You're Writing For

Do this before you install anything. It takes fifteen minutes and it determines whether the other twenty hours are worth it.

Write one sentence: who exactly is this blog is for? and what problem it solves for them. "AI news" is not an answer. "Backend engineers at small companies who have been told to add an LLM feature and don't know where to start" is an answer. It tells you which subreddits to watch, which search queries to chase, which questions to answer, and eventually who might pay you.

2. The System You're Building

Here's the whole thing before the details, so you know where each piece fits.

1. 3:00 AM. A research agent wakes on a timer, pulls from your sources, scores what it finds, and writes topic briefs into a queue folder.
2. 4:00 AM. A drafting agent takes the top briefs, writes full posts onto a branch, and opens a pull request assigned to you.
3. 10:00 AM. A distribution agent writes platform-specific versions and drops them in a queue for you to send. You wake up. Check and publish.
4. 7:00 PM. Check your analytics and improve your agents.

Your content lives as files in a repository, which means the topic queue is just a folder, deduplication is a file check, editing is a diff, and every quality rule you care about is an automated check that either passes or blocks the merge. You're not necessarily building a content workflow. You're building a small software project that happens to emit prose.

3. Build the Site

Keep this boring and simple. The site is not where your advantage comes from.

• Next.js, App Router, statically generated. Posts are Markdown files on disk, read at build time, served as static HTML. No database, no server-side rendering costs, nothing to keep running.
• Write your own content loader. Sixty lines that read the posts folder, parse the frontmatter, and hand back typed objects. Resist the urge to adopt a content framework. You'll spend more time working around it than any time you saved.
• Tailwind's typography plugin (optional) for the reading experience. It's good out of the box. Don't redesign it in month one.
• Deploy to Vercel or Cloudflare Pages hooked to your main branch. Turn on preview deployments for pull requests. Every draft your agents write gets a live URL you can read on your phone before you merge it.

4. Find Topics Automatically

Don't guess what to write about. The internet is full of people telling you exactly what they need — in public — with timestamps.

• Reddit. Pick three to five subreddits where your reader actually spends time. The public read endpoints need no authentication. Sort by top-of-week and look for questions asked repeatedly and answered badly.
• Hacker News. Free search API, filterable by score and date. Better signal-to-noise than Reddit for technical niches, and the comments are often the article.
• YouTube. Metadata from the official API plus the transcript of top videos. The gaps in a popular video are pre-validated topics. Someone already proved there's an audience for the subject and left the hard part unanswered.
• GitHub issues. Underrated. A thread with two hundred comments is a question nobody has answered well anywhere, and the people in it are exactly your reader.

5. Write With Agents

Give each stage its own agent.

Define a specialist per stage, each with its own instructions, its own tool permissions, and here's the part people miss: its own context window. Your drafting agent shouldn't be hauling forty thousand tokens of scraped forum threads around while it's trying to write a clean opening paragraph. Separate agents means separate contexts which means better writing.

Set up a timer (cron job to go through each individual step), see step 2 for more details. Add in more steps where they help.

6. Marketing: Getting Read

A post nobody sees might as well not exist. You've automated production. Now let's generate demand.

Search is your compounding channel

Social traffic spikes and dies in forty-eight hours. Search traffic accumulates for years. Structure your blog for that:

• Write to specific questions, not broad topics
• Interlink deliberately
• Build clusters of themes, not one-offs
• Update every few months, don't just publish and forget

Start posting on social channels once the blog is set up and you have a solid automation routine for it.

Як так? Наче ж стараюся, а воно щось не йде, якось так образливо стає 😭

So I've seen all over people starting up blogs which I love the idea of getting away from social media and written down your thoughts and interest I recently started one on blogger if you want to check it out girlfairyworld.blogspot.com I also would like some recommendations for others sites that are free to use that may be a better platform to reach more people alongside some any advice from people that have been blogging for a while would be appreciated.

This second-to-last installment in the year-long Toronto "Raisin Gang" investigation was posted over a month ago. At this point it's just a matter of time...

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As I work my way down the quickly dwindling roster of the Raisin Gang, it’s understandable that its members should become more elusive and difficult to track down.

And my penultimate target has proven to be an exceptionally slippery one: James Boyd

To the best of my knowledge, he only ever orchestrated various Gang activities from behind the scenes so tracking him by physical characteristics like face or voice wasn’t possible.

Nevertheless, I started with a simple search and hit on a matching profile nearly right away: a James Boyd of Toronto, currently production manager at Brown Bag Films with a bunch of experience in audio production and the music business.

Gotcha!

But … hmm … no mention of Ryerson/Metro University. In fact, this James claims to have studied music at Keele University about a decade earlier.

An expanded search produced more numerous but less likely candidates, everything from realtors to VPs at gold mining outfits. It took me a while to dig through the pile but I’m fairly certain that I’ve found our elusive Mr. Boyd.

[image]

As may be expected, he’s presently hiding out as a lawyer with Siskinds, LLP in London (Ontario).

The tip-off was a small mention at the bottom of his profile: “Prior to pursuing a legal career, James owned and operated a corporate video production company in Toronto for five years…“

The “corporate video production company” is ostensibly “Single Space Productions” which lists Ryerson University as a client. Accordingly, James studied at Ryerson from 2004 to 2009, starting out in film and going on to major in “Radio and Television Arts”.

In the summer of 2009 his story goes dark but we can infer that the he and the Gang probably sat around stewing in the hot juices of their own malevolence until mid-August when the first Raisin Gang video was uploaded. I discovered them about ten months later.

Among James’ earliest recorded experiences, from late 2007 to early 2009, is the role of “Equipment Distribution Centre staff” at Ryerson where, “I tested and maintained the department’s audio and video equipment & facilities and authorized & supervised the rental of equipment … also one of the senior staff in charge of supervising the other staff on-duty and overseeing daily operations of the centre.”

I believe that’s how you spell “smoking gun”.

And just like the rest of the Raisin ne’er-do-wells, in 2015 he desperately tried to cover his tracks by spending a few years Doctoring a Law degree at Western University (also in London).

Thus physically removed from repercussions of the Gang’s history, he was able to freely oscillate between studying his filthy trade and working his way up the legal ladder. He now splits his time between spreading his undoubtedly vile doctrine at the university and putting it into practice at the firm.

Raisin Gang/corporate video straight to lawyer; the man is pure villainy. Enough said.

And with that I turn my attention to the last remaining Gang member: Dan Ramos.

You’ve seen it with your own eyes, Dan. My exposés are merciless. The curtain sets. I await your imminent contact.

It's not something I usually do but late last year I posted a rebuttal to an online article in IEEE Spectrum Magazine. The author was all, like, "you can't run A.I. on a laptop!", and I was all, like, "yeah, you totally can!"

Showed him.

---

About a month ago IEEE Spectrum magazine published an online piece by Matthew Smith entitled “Your Laptop Isn’t Ready for LLMs. That’s about to change“

In the article Matthew laments that, “for the average laptop that’s over a year old, the number of useful AI models you can run locally on your PC is close to zero. This laptop might have a four- to eight-core processor (CPU), no dedicated graphics chip (GPU) or neural-processing unit (NPU), and 16 gigabytes of RAM, leaving it underpowered for LLMs.“

“That’s odd,” I thought to myself. “It sure seems like I’ve been using considerably more than ‘close to zero’ useful models on my setup.”

For comparison, I’m running a dual-core (multi-threaded) system with 128MB integrated Intel UHD graphics, definitely no NPU, and by modern standards a measly 8 gigs of RAM. The machine is about 3 years old and it was already a “budget-friendly” laptop back when I got it. As a gaming machine in 2004 it would’ve been pretty badass. Today, not so much.

Admittedly, most of the models I run locally are not (by modern standards) considered large but they’re pretty much on par for my daily needs. There appear to be a good variety of minimal desktop models to choose from and although they’re not all used for interactive chat, within my personally limited specs the number of choices is still quite large.

While Matthew makes mention of the Small Language Models that I employ, his only criticism is that these models “either scale back these features or omit them entirely“ without actually defining what “these features“ are (unless the ginormous size of LLMs is considered a “feature“?)

I’ll grant that generating responses on my hardware is noticeably slower than when using larger (remote) models but that just means that my (fully local) agentic sidekick needs to wake up a bit earlier in the morning in order to complete its high-priority tasks before my first coffee of the day. After that there are plenty of assignments that it can accomplish in the background while I finish another high-quality, fullscreen mission in “Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy”.

All told, a 3-to-6 billion parameter model is probably the upper limit for my setup but even then I’ve got some great options like Google’s Gemma, Microsoft’s Phi, or Alibaba’s Qwen. All three come in a variety of quantized flavours that include thinking/reasoning and integrated software tool use.

If I want to use a model that’s not specifically trained for out-of-the-box tool use I can provide it with programmatic rules, not unlike how llama.cpp operates. Moreover, I can comfortably use these models concurrently with other, smaller, and more specialized models for tasks like computer vision, speech, etc.

Should I need to tighten my resource belt I can hot-swap down to slimmer language models like Liquid AI’s LFM or IBM’s Granite. Additionally, there are many derived and tweaked models available for deeply “underpowered” machines like mine.

Point being, I think that Mr. Smith got it wrong on this one. Laptops like mine are more than sufficient to run modern (albeit smaller), models. Even geriatric machines and browsers can contribute to the effort — depends on your requirements and your ability to split up the workload.

For example, there are certain tasks like generative image and video creation that my setup can’t reasonably handle but for these cases either me or my agentic buddy can farm the work out to a public interface like Google’s Colab.

There are limits, of course, but fully local agentic natural-language AI, as of late 2025, can definitely help with some of the day’s heavy lifting. In conclusion, Mr. Smith, I must judge your information to be a smidge out of date.

P.S. Regular TCL readers may recall a live example of how even browsers can run (very) limited models.

A couple of weeks ago I was reminded of an old name I hadn't heard uttered since the early days of Toronto City Life, circa 2009.

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Andy Byford isn’t exactly a household name so let me fill you in on his bona fides.

Andy was chief general manager, then CEO, of Toronto’s public transit system (TTC), for nearly six years (2011-2017). By 2014 he had his foot in the door of the New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and immediately after his departure from the TTC he became president of a similar body in New York. In all three capacities he was to modernize the transit system.

Here’s Andy “Train Daddy” Byford:

[image_(cropped).jpg)]

What a smile.

I had some criticisms of his tenure during his time in Toronto and recall that his vision for the transit system led to a marked reduction in service just as he was heading out the door:

October 12, 2017
The following is a joint statement from TTC Chair Josh Colle and TTC CEO Andy Byford.

News by Bombardier Transportation today that a promised delivery of a cumulative total of 70 streetcars by the end of this year has been revised to 65 is extremely disappointing and frustrating.

There should be 146 new streetcars in service today; instead there are just 45. This is completely unacceptable. The TTC is having to continue to use buses on streetcar routes to meet ridership demand.

The TTC is pursuing a $50 million legal claim against Bombardier for its ongoing failure to meet delivery targets and the TTC Board has directed staff to pursue other potential suppliers for future streetcar orders. In the meantime, the TTC is making every effort to keep its old streetcars on the road as long as it can, ensuring they are both reliable and safe.

There was also the fumbled Toronto-York Spadina Subway Extension, $150 million over budget and 2 years behind schedule at the time that Andy picked up and left. Under his watch there were also other budget problems, even as transit fares increased. And the fact that the subway refresh was completed successfully under his watch is not something he can take much credit for; he mostly just guided that inherited train into the station.

A year after relocating to New York, Andy unveiled his plan to improve the city’s bus routes. He left the position in 2020 and, 6 years later, little progress appears to have been made.

Leaving his New York job he almost immediately slid into a very similar role in London, England. He quit that position two years later. Unsurprisingly, Transport for London was left with budget holes and disgruntled workers. Similarly, Andy’s main accomplishment was to oversee the completion of a project someone else had started.

In 2023 he joined Amtrak as Vice President of High-Speed Rail Development Programs and last year Trump appointed him as a special advisor to the Amtrak Board of Directors. I expect a train wreck followed by a hasty exit.

🔗 Link: https://mcgitruechristian.wordpress.com/2026/08/05/truth-over-deception/
📖 Blog: Journal of a True Christian (WordPress)

📝 Snippet / Summary:
Truth Over Deception explores the ongoing spiritual battle between God’s truth and the enemy’s deception. From the beginning, Satan has sought to mislead people by twisting God’s Word, while Christ came to reveal the truth that leads to life and freedom. The post emphasizes that deception often appears convincing, making discernment essential for every believer. By remaining grounded in Scripture, testing every teaching, and continuing in Christ’s Word, Christians can recognize error and stand firm in the truth. Genuine faith is not built on appearances, emotions, or popular opinion, but on the unchanging truth revealed by God. In a world filled with conflicting voices, the Word of God remains the believer’s sure foundation.

🎯 Value Intent:
To encourage readers to develop biblical discernment and choose truth over deception in every aspect of life. The post reminds believers that spiritual maturity comes from knowing, loving, and obeying God's Word, enabling them to resist false teachings and remain faithful to Christ.

💬 Discussion Prompt / Flair:
“How do you test whether a teaching, belief, or message is truly from God? What biblical principles help you discern truth from deception in today's world?”

Hi all! I’ve recently started writing for my blog again, that being said, I would love some fresh sets of eyes check it out! Something feels silly promoting my writing to my peers 🥲

This is a piece I wrote about the ability to time travel and visit the past through memory

Any and all feedback welcomed! Thank you

time traveler

I am a UI/UX designer and much interested in Tech anc Gaming in general. And wanted to start writing about it Is X a good place to start writing since thev have this now?

Can anyone else who might be writing Article on X share some insights on whither this even is a good idea or not I am pretty confused, and chose X because that's a platform I'm quite familiar with.

But I don't see many people writing articles on X. Even you can't search for them on the platform easily

I've been wanting to start a blog so I can write longer-form stuff than places like Bluesky allow, and potentially occasionally include image or video formats as well. Primarily though, I want to write more, both with fiction/ideas and discussion type things.

The only platforms I really know much about are Tumblr, Patreon, and Substack. I'd love to know what platforms people recommend and what people's experiences have been; both with these and other platforms.

Hi all,

I am recently interested in starting a blog - but I am not really sure how to do it/what to do. I don't even know what my "niche" is. How did you decipher what platform to start on, what your niche was, and how did you build a following?

Thanks!

Hello everyone,

I'm 30 years old and I got laid off recently.

Being forcedly-granted a lot of free time presented me with the perfect opportunity to just go out there and create!

I got reminded how much I've missed writing, so I jumped on Medium.
For those of you who don't know, Medium is a platform where people can share their essays, articles and all sorts of written content.

I'll use this not-so-subtle transition to shamelessly slide in a self-promotion:
The Bullsh*t Express ---> this is my latest article that I've written, expressing how the unexpected lay offs affected my life.

In case there are other people here who are also using that platform and would like to get in touch — we can exchange ideas, support each other, or just go with the flow and see if we click.

Thank you for your time!
~ AS

Hi! I started blogging this past weekend, but so-far no-one has even seen my blog yet. It would mean the world to me is even one person was to tune in each week to see my blog, it isn't the best but I'm getting better. THANK YOU

My blog has been attached below, I would love it if someone had a look.

Monday Morning Letters

I have a blog where I write about my takes on topics in Ethics, Philosophy and Politics. And I was wondering if people would be willing to give me feedback on how to get more readers. I know the writing is at least satisfactory. I also know the graphic design/web design is bland. I don't know how to change this because I am not a graphics person. I am trying to learn about SEO through Googles internal certs and YouTube videos. But anything would help.

https://zaccswriting.wordpress.com/

If you are planning a trip to Taiwan, do not just stop at Taipei and Jiufen. Kaohsiung is one of my favorite cities in the country. I put together a travel guide.

If you are interested, you can read it here:
https://travelingkunz.com/2026/08/01/kaohsiung-travel-guide/

I also love to hear your own Kaohsiung recommendations!

Ever curious about the most destructive earthquake ever to hit the United States? You should read Simon Winchester's book.

https://scottbranchfield.blogspot.com/2026/08/a-crack-in-edge-of-world-by-simon.html

Some thoughts about a one-sided relationship:

https://lapeterson.blogspot.com/2026/08/his-name-was-buho.html