Brain Dumps
Real lessons from building real projects. No fluff, no theory – just honest insights from the trenches of development, complete with spectacular failures and hard-won victories.

June 30, 2026
title-tagmeta-descriptionon-page-seoseo
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: Lengths, Limits, and What Google Actually Shows
Title under ~60 chars, keyword-first. Meta description ~120–160 chars, written to earn the click. Google rewrites descriptions a lot — so write for the times it doesn't.

June 25, 2026
twitter-cardsopen-graphsocial-sharingmeta-tags
Twitter/X Cards vs Open Graph: What's the Difference and Do You Need Both?
You don't need to duplicate everything. X/Twitter falls back to Open Graph when twitter: tags are missing — so implement OG as the foundation, then add two Twitter-specific tags and call it done.

June 23, 2026
How I automate keyword research with Claude and DataForSEO (the €0 Ahrefs alternative)
Ahrefs costs €400/month. Here's the workflow I actually use — Claude Code orchestrating DataForSEO's pay-per-call API, clustering the output, and spitting out a brief that doesn't read like a SaaS demo.

June 22, 2026
ai-writingsigns-of-ai-writingai-slopai-code-detectionhumanize-ai-textwriting
The Signs of AI Writing (and AI Code): A Field Guide to the Tells
The real signs of AI writing — delve, em-dash clusters, rule-of-three, copula avoidance — plus the AI-code tells nobody talks about, and how to score and fix text.

June 19, 2026
technical-seoai-searchllms-txtgeowill-llmstxt-file-help-your-seodoes-llmstxt-workdoes-google-use-llmstxtgoogle-llmstxt-updateis-llmstxt-worth-it-2026does-llmstxt-help-seo
Google says llms.txt is 'fine.' That's not the same as 'it works for AI SEO'
Google's June 2026 update calls llms.txt 'fine' to use — but says it won't help (or hurt) Search. Ahrefs found 97% of llms.txt files get zero bot requests. The real story.

June 18, 2026
ai-slopai-generated-contentgenerative-aiweb-designaccessibilitydead-internet
How Much of the Web Is AI-Generated? What the Data Actually Says
By mid-2025, ~35% of new websites were AI-generated. But the data on whether everything 'looks the same' is more surprising than the meme. Here's what's real and what isn't.

June 18, 2026
open-graphog-imagesocial-sharingseo
og:image Size Guide: The 1200x630 Rule and the Safe Zone Nobody Mentions
1200x630 px, 1.91:1 ratio — that's the baseline. But the safe zone, the file-size ceiling, and the width/height attributes crawlers need are what most guides skip. Here's all of it.

June 16, 2026
open-graphsocial-sharingdebuggingog-image
Why Your Link Preview Isn't Showing (and How to Fix It)
You updated your og:image, you reshared the link, and it still shows the old card. Here's what's actually happening — and the exact steps to fix it.

June 15, 2026
ai-slopai-designweb-designdesign-reviewgenerative-aiaccessibility
How to Tell If a Website Was AI-Generated: A Field Guide
A practical checklist for spotting AI-generated websites — the visual tells, the dead giveaways in the code, and how to confirm it by measuring the page instead of guessing.

June 11, 2026
open-graphmeta-tagssocial-sharingseo
Open Graph Tags Explained: og:title, og:description, og:image, og:type
Open Graph tags are the four lines in your that control how your link looks when someone shares it. Here's what each one does, the mistakes that break previews, and the minimum block every page needs.

June 11, 2026
ai-slopai-designtailwinddesign-systemsgenerative-aiweb-design
Why Every AI-Built Website Is Purple (and Looks the Same)
AI-built sites are purple because of one default color in Tailwind UI that saturated AI training data — then fed back on itself. Here's the full chain, and how to break it.

June 9, 2026
ai-slopai-design-slopai-designuxgenerative-aiweb-designaccessibility
What Is AI Design Slop? (And Why Every AI-Built Site Looks the Same)
What AI design slop is, why AI tools keep defaulting to the same purple-gradient, glass-card, low-contrast UI, what the data actually says about web homogenization, and how to catch it before it ships.
Got Questions or War Stories?
I love hearing about other people's spectacular failures and unexpected wins. Drop me a line if you've got a story to share or a question about any of these posts.
Let's Share Some War Stories