This month was busy in the real world.
End-of-year work pressure and events, family catchups, and the general December chaos all landed at once. I also took about two weeks off over Christmas and New Year (camping, beach time, day hikes and home DIY projects!).
The site still moved forward. Slower than I would’ve liked, but steady. I was thinking a lot of the power of 1% daily improvement.
Security and maintenance
Critical Vulnerability Exploits (CVE's) happen, and when they do it's generally a tools down, this is now the highest priority. Unfortunately Next.js experienced a CVE (through React) around the 3rd Dec 2025. Hats off to the Vercel team, the patch versions were easy to apply.
Content Progress
The Case Studies section of the site has been showing a "Coming Soon" screen since launch. This month, I've updated this section of the site with three case studies I'm currently writing. They're behind password-protected pages (another nice challenge feature to work out).
Getting the password protected approach right took a bit of tinkering, but I'm happy with where it landed. It's a practical solution that lets me publish case studies while controlling access.
Other updates
- Fixed a sitemap issue related to how case studies were being handled
- Added canonical tags
- Fixed Open Graph so each page uses its actual URL (I previously had everything resolving to the homepage, which made sharing previews useless)
The Easter Egg
I added an Easter egg to the site I've had in mind for a while.
If you find it, good. That’s the whole deal. Small moments like this make the site feel human.
Data Snapshot
Metric | Month 1 Baseline | Month 2 | Month 3 | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Visitors | 55 | 21 | 16 | |
Sessions | 94 | 57 | 48 | |
Bounce rate | 46 % | 35% | 35% | |
Channels | 89 % Direct · 9 % Referral · 2 % Search | 60 % Direct · 22 % Referral · 18 % Search | 80 % Direct · 10 % Referral · 10 % Search | |
Device split | 84 % Desktop · 16 % Mobile | 90 % Desktop · 10 % Mobile | 87 % Desktop · 13 % Mobile | |
Top countries | 🇺🇸 US (36) · 🇦🇺 AU (15) | 🇺🇸 US (13) · 🇦🇺 AU (6) | 🇺🇸 US (11) · 🇦🇺 AU (5) | |
Indexed pages | ~3 avg over 28 days | 8 pages | 10 Pages | |
Crawl errors | 1 total | 0 | 0 | |
Outbound clicks | 1 (LinkedIn) | 0 | 1 (primer.style) | |
LinkedIn followers | 397 | 397 | 398 | |
X followers | 1 924 | 1919 | 1914 |
How it feels
Overall, I'm still happy with the trajectory.
The site is getting sturdier and more consistent. Content is moving. I’m still showing up for that 1% gain. I'm really happy to have added an Easter Egg to the site, and I've got a good idea on how to tackle the blog post image thumbnails. Here's to a big year, bring on 2026.