Writing

Six simple onboarding tasks that teach the whole of favURL, improve every profile and quietly rebuilt the dashboard around momentum.

The last post in the favURL series and the one with an ask. The freemium features are free for real: no card, no timer.

People asked what a favURL page looks like, so I built a gallery at favurl.com/world: hundreds of real businesses, from real Google reviews.

My friend Valter's restaurant had 200+ Google reviews doing all the marketing work, sitting unused. That became favURL. He became an accidental co-founder.

Five months of building one project a month with AI in the loop. Everything shipped, everything quietly let go and what 'fail fast' finally taught me.

A practical path for a Kosovo or Albania startup to reach a billion dollars: the capital stack, the legal structure and the proximity none of it works without.

Estonia, Croatia and Lithuania are smaller or comparable in size to Kosovo and Albania. Each still produced a unicorn that reshaped its startup ecosystem.

Kosovo and Albania's diaspora sends home billions a year. Organized like Silicon Valley's Indian diaspora, that same generosity could build companies instead.

Kosovo and Albania keep getting sold as mineral and textile economies. The fastest-growing export either country actually has is software, built by people.

Kosovo and Albania get 2.5 billion euros a year in remittances. One breakout startup would do more for the ecosystem than another decade of that money.

Germany, Poland, Korea and a five-country Nordic coalition each keep a government-backed house in Silicon Valley. Kosovo and Albania have the institutions to build one together. They haven't.

After years away from entrepreneurship, I'm back, using AI agents to develop ideas, turn them into working things and document the journey here.

A short farewell note from the badivuku.com era: what I have been working on with startups, where to find me and what comes next. Catch you later.

Lessons from launching an Albanian-language educational platform in 2011, before edtech was even a word people used in Kosovo.

The lessons I took away from MozCon 2021, from data validation to the value of being in rooms where you get schooled.

Watching young Kosovars graduate from a STEAM program gave me genuine hope about where the country is heading.

Brand names and identities are changing all the time. Here are 35 companies that evolved their identity and became something bigger.

Started reading about company pivots and found myself blown away: Nintendo and other brands that made complete 180-degree turns from their first idea.

Notes and takeaways from attending MozCon 2020 virtually during lockdown, a refreshing SEO conference that went ahead as scheduled from home.

Notes from a STIKK panel on brain drain after the pandemic and how Kosovo can prepare its market and talent for the future. I joined from abroad.

A curated list of the free SVG illustration resources I keep coming back to for projects, from undraw and Humaaans to isometric and hand-drawn sets.

Hack the Crisis Kosova brought together researchers, startups and tech enthusiasts to build solutions during the pandemic.

How a CRM, a social media giveaway and tracking my prospects led to a free t-shirt from the T-Mobile CEO and why every brand should do the same.

One no-brainer for representing yourself online, whether it is a personal brand or a business: go and get yourself a short URL.

Qysh Me has been acquired by Dua, a network that aims to connect Albanians around the globe. We believe in Dua's mission and its leadership.

Signing off until the new year to spend quality time with my wife and family. A short note on stepping away and why the break matters this year.

Apple launched Apple Card this year, but it turns out Apple had a branded credit card concept back in 1992. A look at the surprising throwback.

Notes and photos from the Google Webmaster Conference Product Summit in Mountain View, 4 November 2019, a day with Search product managers.

A plain-English glossary of the internet marketing acronyms you will actually run into, from CMS, CPA and CPC to the rest of the alphabet soup.

Google is bringing its Webmaster Conference to Mountain View on November 4th. I got in. Why I am excited and what to expect from the day.

A curated list of YouTube channels for the core of computer science and the math and theory behind it, from CS50 and MIT OpenCourseWare to 3Blue1Brown.

A curated list of YouTube channels for audio production, video editing, motion design and 3D, covering tools like After Effects, Blender and the major DAWs.

A curated list of YouTube channels for digital design, from Illustrator and flat-design illustration to Procreate and hand-drawing, beyond just web design.

A curated list of YouTube channels for learning game development, covering Unity, Unreal, Godot and Pygame, plus game design and the code behind it all.

A curated list of YouTube channels for computer hardware: PC building and buying guides, plus Arduino, Raspberry Pi, 3D printing and DIY electronics.

A curated list of YouTube channels for learning how the internet and networking actually work, from home routers and DNS to CCNA-level fundamentals.

A curated list of YouTube channels for the job search, tech interviews and personal finance, the practical skills school never quite gets around to teaching.

A curated list of YouTube channels for learning machine learning and deep learning, spanning practical applied ML, PyTorch and TensorFlow, theory and research.

A short, curated list of YouTube channels for genuinely understanding operating systems, from installing and managing Linux to running Windows Server.

A curated list of YouTube channels for learning to program: Python, C and C++, C# and .NET, Java and Kotlin, plus algorithms.

A curated list of YouTube channels for web development: HTML, CSS and JavaScript fundamentals through React, Vue and Node, plus web design and freelancing.

As summer gently fades, September arrives with its crisp mornings and golden hues, inviting us to embrace change and new beginnings.

Discover methods to customize your Apple Card by removing the white coating and engraving designs. Benefits and considerations to think about

If you do not know much about Apple Card, here is friendly advice on credit scores, APR and the interface beyond the Wallet app.

Partia e Fortë dissolved in 2019. On why a joke that worked so well eventually stopped and why that ending may be its most honest part.

We're better together. With our keyword and link research tools combined with MOZ's daily rankings and SERP analytics now have most robust organic search

Here's me trying to write a blog post about my visit at Google campus. There is nothing that I can say because those are the rules.

Back to writing after the holidays and a herniated disk that kept me on my back for weeks. A note on recovery, family time and the year ahead.

A local's guide to visiting Silicon Valley: the tech landmarks, museums and company HQs worth seeing, plus events, neighborhoods and what to watch out for.

After a mix-up, Y Combinator accepted all 15,000 Startup School applicants, my team included. What it was actually like.

A visit to Amazon Go, the cashier-less convenience store that lets you walk in, grab what you want and walk out. No line, no register, no friction.

Three days in Seattle at MozCon 2018: badges, stage talks and a SERP-features lunch table, ending with the person who first taught me SEO: Rand Fishkin.

MozCon is happening in Seattle, Washington is the ideal location for SEO Talks to launch another discussion series and tech blog. SEO

Taking the next step toward becoming a certified Salesforce Trailblazer with hands-on Pardot marketing-automation training. Notes from the sessions.

Engaged! - Having never been together for more than 10 years, this was just formality but looking back two weeks later I think we had was a blast.

I ran a few images through Google's Cloud Vision API. The objects and labels it detected show how easily your images can undermine your site's content quality.

We all get some SPAM emails during the day, but some emails are just better than others. Down below I will share a good video similar to Georgina Rowland

My tire blew out on I-880. While stranded, I found three real local-SEO business cases: map-pack ranking, off-hours demand and shops with no web presence.

A 1982 illustration predicted the future of gaming. Looking at today's photoreal graphics and VR, a reflection on how close those old predictions actually got.

In 1913, California purchased the state of Nevada to create an illustrated short history of itself in an attempt to increase tourism.

Notes from a BayAreaSearch SEO panel at LinkedIn, where Aleyda Solis, Andrew Shotland and others shared their biggest SEO mistakes and what followed.

Committing to a video a week on YouTube whether I have the time or a story or not. This is episode one, my first awkward try at talking to camera.

Let us imagine we can divide by zero and see what happens. This is what an old mechanical calculator does when you ask it to.

This means valuing non-monetary forms of compensation, such as happiness, fulfillment and personal growth, just as highly as financial rewards.

The List of Gardens and Parks in San Jose is a page for anyone interested or visiting San Jose, these are open to the public almost all the time.

Your Albanian translations have been seen over 3B times this month. Which is so cool to know that you might help your community with something like this.

The guy is shipping back bricks, with a prepaid postage (from the campaign fund) that was sent to him to ask for campaign support.

Instagram will not charge you to convert your personal account to a business account. But what it does do, is allow you to pay for advertisements

Pokémon Go got millions of people to walk outside on command. That behavior-change engine points to where location-based advertising goes.

Back in 2002 a man who was going through a very difficult financial time went to a pizza place and ordered a pizza for his family. Paid 13 years later.

Tips For Maintaining A Good Credit Score. Treat all of your debts equally when it comes time to pay. Keep old credit cards open to maintain a longer history

This is my first post. I will try to blog in english, if you notice something that you think it's not correct and wanna help, please shoot an email

A popular WordPress site is a target. The unglamorous maintenance discipline that kept Qysh Me safe and online as its traffic and reputation grew.

Meeting Jason Fried in Redwood City. Why Basecamp's approach to strategy and scale is the one I keep coming back to.

A neighborhood gym wasting money on a broad audience. How tighter targeting and a real offer turned Facebook ads into steady memberships.

An early content-SEO project for a B2B company sitting on a silent blog and how answering real customer questions grew qualified leads.

Years of testing every shiny new thing in digital marketing. What survived and why the testing itself turned out to be the only thing that mattered.

A Kosovo news outlet asked how a verified Facebook Page like the Prime Minister's could get compromised. Quoted as a 'social media expert' on the mechanics.

As Qysh Me grew into hundreds of how-to articles, structure became the product. How we organized WordPress so readers could find things.

Ripost invited readers to copy and repost everything we made, including the sentence saying so. What that position cost and what it bought.

Emirates Air's free-flights giveaway on Facebook outperformed the page's own like count, a result that beat simply boosting a post.

Chrome's move to auto-block Flash-based ads in September 2015 finally gave me the excuse I needed to tell clients running Flash banners to switch to HTML5.

Posts that vanish in 24 hours sound insane for a business. So I talked a client into testing whether that is a bug or the whole point.

An early project where the real fix was a small web product: an online booking tool for a salon drowning in phone calls.

Ripost invited people to copy everything we published. Notes on canonicals, speed and structure when duplication is the strategy, not the problem.

Live streaming from a phone is suddenly a thing. I convinced a nervous client to go live. The unpolished realness is exactly what worked.

Below the featured mosaic, Ripost ran an endless river of items labelled by format, not section. On designing a homepage for scrolling.

A Reddit Photoshop request went hilariously wrong. I kept it as a short, honest lesson in asking clearly for what you actually want, online or off.

Google's mobile-friendly update lands today. For once I am not panicking, because I have spent a year fixing my sites for phones.

A service business whose landing page looked fine and converted poorly. One A/B test, a clear winner and the habit of testing over guessing.

Producing PunPun at Ripost meant unlearning television. On short formats, cutting for the phone and losing the broadcast slot.

Ripost replaced the category menu with a row of live hashtags across every page. What that changed about how people moved through the site.

Four years after launching Qysh Me, our Facebook page crossed 100,000 likes. What that number really meant and the slow, unglamorous work that got us there.

Facebook is pushing its own player hard. I ran the same video two ways to see how much it favors native uploads. It was not close.

If your platform's name is a verb, the interface has to let people do it. UX notes from Ripost on building for sharing and screenshots.

An early e-commerce project where the biggest win was an email that did not exist yet and what it taught me about owned audiences.

Ripost carried a BETA label next to the logo on purpose. Notes on running formats as experiments and what the label bought us.

I always wrote subject lines by gut. Then I started split-testing them. The results were so lopsided I will never guess again.

We founded Ripost as an internet platform, not a news portal. What that distinction meant in practice for a newsroom of misfits.

When a drone stopped a Serbia vs Albania match, we had one on Zeri's pages within minutes: what a fast team and a willing partner can do while a story is alive.

An early social project for a small fashion boutique. How a consistent content rhythm grew a real audience and what I still recommend.

Half my traffic is now on phones and my sites were built desktop first. How I am testing every page the way people actually use it.

Facebook was where our audience already lived. How Qysh Me turned useful how-to content into a growing, engaged page and why we shared value instead of links.

Cara Delevingne posted a friend to her 5.8 million Instagram followers. A quick look at what that spike actually looked like on the other end.

An early local-SEO project for a dental clinic invisible in local search. The unglamorous fixes that got them into the map pack.

No one handed us a manual. In the middle of this strange experiment, here is what I think I am learning about how attention actually works.

When the June 2014 results came in, my name had 71 votes next to it. A small number with a lot to say about audience versus electorate.

A client swore their business was boring with nothing to photograph. Here is the Instagram experiment we ran to prove there is always something.

A Deutsche Welle piece on Kosovo's tech scene quoted two future Partia e Fortë candidates, including me talking about Elexoj at Startup Weekend Prishtina.

Years running a party's social media from behind the feed, then a live national TV debate: what changes when the person doing the work is suddenly on screen.

Before Kosovo's June 2014 vote I surveyed my own network on where the parties stood. What it found and what it honestly could not tell us.

Not all of Partia e Fortë's work was light. How 'Manual për Burra' used an absurdist voice to poke hard at gender roles in Kosovo.

By 2014 most of our readers were on phones, so we built Qysh Me an app and billed it, half-jokingly, as the first Albanian how-to app.

For 2014, Partia e Fortë turned its candidates into the ad. I was number 28. My poster made a joke at my own expense.

In May 2014 Partia e Fortë registered 64 candidates for parliament and I was number ten. On putting your real name behind the joke.

A pointed look at a Kosovo minister's official site, one that reads more like a personal fan page for his party than a public institution.

Those ads that follow you around after a visit? I set them up for a client. The results are surprisingly good and a little unsettling.

An early agency project: rebuilding a local restaurant's site for mobile and what a single responsive redesign did for their bookings.

Long before mobile-first was standard, most of Qysh Me's readers were on phones. How the small screen made the whole product better.

A satirical party from a small Balkan country ended up in the international press. On watching a local joke become a story told abroad.

Organic reach on my Facebook Pages drops every month and Facebook clearly wants us to pay. What I am testing to hold on to my audience.

Partia e Fortë was funny on purpose but never only a joke. On what it meant that young Kosovars found their political voice through satire.

Catching a Kosovo classifieds site letting sellers stuff listings with unrelated keywords to game search and testing how far it could actually be pushed.

A look at Instagram's first wave of ads, from Michael Kors to Lexus and Ben & Jerry's, broken down by follower counts, likes and comments.

An online following is not the same as a result. How Partia e Fortë turned an internet audience into an actual seat in the Pristina municipal assembly.

Everyone talks about content marketing like it is new. It is the same goal I always chased, only now the honest way and the winning way agree.

Partia e Fortë did not just post, it produced: campaign songs, absurd video spots, a plate of baklava as a political broadcast.

In October 2013 Partia e Fortë launched a campaign song, 'I Will Become a Millionaire.' I helped present it. It still holds up.

Vanity metrics are a trap. A satirical party is easy to fool with them. How I decided what was worth measuring when the goal was impact.

Before candidate ten in 2014, there was candidate 28 in 2013: my first campaign bio for Partia e Fortë, in the party's deadpan voice, for the race we won.

Mentoring at Startup Grind Prishtina, where a co-founder of The Pirate Bay presented and we argued all evening about sharing and distribution.

A satirical party with no budget cannot buy reach. It has to be built by volunteers who find the work fun. On organizing the people who made the campaign run.

A Coca-Cola Romania campaign wove live tweets into TV ad breaks under the hashtag #LetsEatTogether, chasing the lunch-alone crowd with a soda on the table.

For the 2013 Pristina assembly election, Partia e Fortë fielded the city's youngest candidate list, average age 25.9. That was the point.

Google Authorship attaches your photo to your articles in search results. I set it up this week. It is doing something to my click rate.

The satire lived in the writing but traveled on the design. On Trembelat's identity and why a joke party had to look more serious than real ones.

People lose roughly 500 meters a day circling for parking, about 15 kilometers a month. Here's a simple, low-cost way to spot a free spot faster.

A short history of illustrated storytelling, from newspaper comic strips to the four-panel reaction-face photos that replaced them online.

Explaining YouTube's then-new "301+" view-count badge, why counters stall near round numbers and a short detour into how CDNs work.

Not every post from that period was satire. In July 2013 I wrote and signed a real petition against a proposed amnesty law in Kosovo, asking others to sign too.

A sarcastic July 2013 argument that a proposed amnesty law, following the ratified Kosovo-Serbia agreements, gave citizens grounds to leave.

The difference between a satirical page that grows and one that dies is timing. How I ran Partia e Fortë's channels as a real-time operation.

A one-line joke about an irrigation tender in Pristina, paired with the photo that made the punchline land without needing another word.

A photo essay of Kosovo Police cars parked illegally in every spot regular drivers get ticketed for, closing with a straightforward question for the department.

Gary Vaynerchuk's take on running Vine and Instagram Video side by side instead of forcing a winner between them, since each does something the other doesn't.

A profile of a Kosovo child YouTuber pulling in millions of views and a rough back-of-envelope look at what those numbers might actually be worth.

A short thank-you for a June 15th birthday spent catching three live sets in a row, plus one memorably green drink that kept showing up on camera.

Qysh Me could not scale on two people alone. How we brought in contributors, kept quality high and turned readers into writers.

Noticing an undocumented 3G rollout by watching a phone quietly switch from EDGE, with nothing official from IPKO to confirm it.

The (not provided) line in analytics keeps growing and hiding my search terms. Instead of complaining, I am finding other ways to read intent.

Ten minutes of rain is apparently enough to jam every road in Pristina. I caught it on video, no crashes, no drama, just gridlock, as proof.

A short video diary of buying a bike to ride around Pristina, immediately followed by three straight days of rain that kept me from riding it at all.

Discovering Strava and what tracking every ride's route, speed and time actually adds once you start paying attention, including a humbling average speed.

A knockoff Pizza Hut, extra T included, opens in Pristina, reviewed alongside Kosovo's habit of dousing everything in ketchup and mayo.

A short note on good weather, the awkward gap in Albanian for the English word ride and a good excuse to finally get out on a bike.

A look back at 2007 stats showing Digg briefly out-drawing Facebook in unique visits and what that says about how fast online power can change hands.

Ryanair's Clio Gold-winning "honest ad" campaign, kept here as a reference for how far blunt honesty can carry a budget airline's entire pitch.

Every campaign wants a slogan that sticks. Ours worked because it was also an accusation. A look at how 'We always promise' carried Partia e Fortë.

Google is shutting Reader down in July. Losing the quiet engine behind how I stay informed is a hard lesson about free tools I do not own.

A short, joke traffic photo out of Kosovo, credited to Jared Ewy, Social Media Specialist, with a deadpan warning not to try any of it at home.

The hardest part of running social for Partia e Fortë was keeping a voice so consistent people knew a line was ours before they saw the name.

Before we had an office, a recognizable logo, or a single vote, we had a Facebook page. Why the platform choice was the strategy.

After two years of arguing about what works in marketing, I found the answer. Stop arguing. Test it. The idea that changed how I work.

A 2012 poster calling Prishtina to a moustache walk two days before Albania's independence centenary and why the print run mattered.

In November 2012 a group of us in Pristina started a party that promised everything and meant none of it. This is how it began.

SEO for Qysh Me meant ranking in Albanian, a language with almost no digital content at the time. Why that emptiness was an advantage.

Responsive design is the phrase of the year. Rather than argue about it, I rebuilt one site to adapt to phones and watched the numbers.

Watching the Red Bull Stratos space jump go viral in real time across YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, from a work desk in Pristina.

A Sunday-evening conceptual-art experiment: printing a random Wikipedia article, framing it and watching for a reaction that never really came.

Google redraws its logo for occasions that matter. Ahead of Albania's independence centenary, I petitioned for one and built the mockup: 14,000+ signatures.

Everyone in marketing is making infographics right now. I finally tried one, spent way too long on it and learned that the design was the easy part.

The Amazing Spider-Man sold out Pristina's first 3D screenings, exposing just how little cinema etiquette a downloads-raised generation had picked up.

A one-line satirical jab at a Kosovo government ministry, a joke title where the accompanying image did most of the work, not the text.

A short, mostly-image post about losing time to other people's blogs, most of the original context now lost along with the broken embeds.

A people-watching essay from Pristina's main square on the diaspora home for summer and how a second square only sharpened the question of who belongs where.

How Qysh Me's cooking section grew into a vertical with its own identity, its own audience and the first ads we ever sold.

I signed up for Pinterest as an afterthought. A few weeks later it is in my top referrers. Here is what I am testing to figure out why and whether it lasts.

The editorial system behind Qysh Me. How real questions people were already asking became a repeatable how-to content engine.

Penguin is punishing the exact link-building and keyword tactics people sold as gospel two years ago. I am cleaning house and relieved.

We built an Albanian audiobook platform over a weekend and won. What actually decided it was not the product, it was the letters we got signed.

A hobby project called Televizioni.net let people browse video ads on purpose, built on the idea that a good ad deserves an audience that showed up for it.

One of the oldest, most useful frameworks I've found for creativity: it's not a single spark, just a handful of moves applied to what already exists.

Why the Albanian-language web was full of bad websites: no real local ad revenue and no working path to online payment for local businesses.

Seven unsolicited marketing texts landed in one week from local providers. There was nowhere to complain, no opt-out, no one accountable for any of it.

Twenty-two failed attempts to reach Vala's customer service line, kept as a case study in why local telecom struggles to earn trust.

I didn't have much to add on selling, so I'm pointing to someone else's breakdown of what actually makes it hard, laid out better than I could have.

A running annoyance with Pristina cafes upselling a drink at every stop and a small, petty way of pushing back on the ones that pushed hardest.

Facebook is forcing every Page onto Timeline. I spent the weekend testing what the big cover photo and pinned posts can do for a brand.

Before Qysh Me had a name, it was an idea we couldn't launch: in Albanian, unlike English, 'how to' never quite worked as a name. Here's how we found it.

A home-network troubleshooting log: 46 minutes convinced me a 16-month-old IPKO router had failed, plus a look at how many others had the same complaint.

A single month of Google Analytics from Qysh Me's early days: 44,111 visits, 163,950 pageviews and a traffic mix that quietly explained the whole business.

Everyone is chasing Facebook and Twitter, but the quiet thing growing my blog is RSS. How I use Google Reader and Feedburner daily.

How we optimized Qysh Me's WordPress site for slow connections and cheap phones and why performance doubled as an SEO strategy.

QR codes are suddenly on every poster and business card. I ran an experiment to see whether people in Prishtina actually scan them.

Google finally made a social network that is not a Facebook clone. Circles are clever. I am testing whether any of it helps a brand.

Klout claims to measure your influence with one number. Getting obsessed with pushing mine up taught me more about vanity than influence.

Why a two-person team building Albania's first how-to portal chose WordPress over a custom build and what that choice let us do.

The Panda update shook up SEO this year. Thin content is punished, real content wins and I think that is good news for people like me.