New blog post on my wedding celebrant website: The long and gradual cancellation of Josh Withers
The way we’re going here we’ll be on ICQ soon and I am here for it: Friendster is back.
My favourite Charles Bukowski quote is “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts and the stupid ones are full of confidence.” Mainly because when you share it, some people are too confident it’s about them.
Today’s another one of those weird days in the best and most beautiful, yet also so strange, wedding industry. Sometime in a few years over a beer remind me to tell you the story about the Tasmanian Wedding Directory
My only experiences with electric vehicles are in renting them, and I rent quite a few as I travel.
The out-of-home charging infrastructure is bad.
Three stories from today:
- I’m staying at my mother-in-law’s home in suburban Gold Coast and the nearest public charging infrastructure is a 15 minute drive away. It’s got two charging bays, each time I visit there’s a queue.
- I had a long drive today and needed to charge in Brisbane before the drive. I get fee Chargefox charging with my Sixt rental but the best located charging station was at a BP. The app - BP Pulse - is yet another horrible corporate app that forgets logins, doesn’t work well, and the third BP app I have on my phone. The working charger didn’t work, and the second was pre-identified as not working. So once the “working charger” had not charged the charging cable was locked and would not come out of the car. The BYD Atto’s manual is electronic and requires the car have internet access. There are three methods to manually unlock, it took me to the third method.
- Charging station locations on Apple Maps and Google Maps sucks. Tonight I wanted to charge at a certain charger and I started the journey in a no-service area so I used BYD in-built maps which don’t know about an exit that had changed so I missed the exit and almost ran out of battery because I couldn’t charge at the BP charger earlier. Further to that I’m now charging at a charger in Brisbane city that’s not on any mapping application but is in the Chargefox app, however in the app it’s across the road and a few hundred metres away and apparently in a construction yard.
It’s a weird time to be a travelling EV driver.
Modern man is in a terrible predicament. He is helplessly enamoured with the beauty of what the old world built, yet despises the beliefs that inspired them to build it.
On 65x24 and editors
On the same day Fuji announced invest a new camera (which I would love to own!) I discover an app that shoots in one of the Fuji’s built-in aspect ratios, made famous by Hasselblad: 65x24.
The thing that breaks my mind about crops like this is that you’re leaving good pixels on the table.
Which activates a traumatised part of my brain. But also reminds mee of the power of a good editor. That the best editors know what to remove, not what to add.
picked up a new cool domain name for my non-personal and non-wedding blogging: thesmh.com.au
I've been learning about SEO and GEO and could help you too
Over the past two years I have become really disillusioned with advertising and marketing agencies. I’m in a weird, niche, very unique field, so it’s possibly my fault, but on all the accounts I can recall the provider of the marketing, advertising, and SEO services has also let me down professionally.
A friend who is a professional SEO operator took payment for services then never replied to a message after then. Colleagues in the wedding industry took payment for marketing services, then stopped responding when I questioned the low effectiveness of the ads. Countless stories of poor performance. Thousands of dollars wasted on stupid strategies.
So I’ve taken it upon myself to stop paying people and to learn to do it myself and I’ve spent the last year reading and studying SEO and GEO. SEO is optimisation for the search engines like Google, Bing, Kagi etc, and GEO is optimisation for the LLM AI products like ChatGPT and Claude.
I’ve been implementing these new skills and I’m now in the stage of seeing results. Slowly but surely, which is the only true way to win in SEO and GEO, over the long game. Anyone promising a short game win is doing dodgy work that will no doubt come unstuck eventually.
I’m actually happy enough to share my strategy because it’s not really my strategy, it’s just me doing what the search engines, LLMs, and industry says to do. Apparently it’s all out there in black and white ready for you and I to learn and read. We just mostly ignore it and then complain about the algorithm.
It’s a three pronged solution:
- Website speed and technicalities
- Content on your website
- Content on other websites aka backlinks.
Website speed
The easiest way to slice this is to enter your webpages in the PageSpeed Insights tool and to get your pages to 100/100/100/100 on desktop and mobile. It’s hard work.
I eventually gave up trying to get those scores on Squarespace and Wordpress websites and I learned static site generators. In particular, Astro.
This is just an incentives game. Slow websites cost the crawlers literal money because it takes longer to crawl each page. They don’t like you if you cost them money, plus users don’t like you either.
Content on your own website
It turns out that these algorithms don’t know what we don’t tell them. So we need to tell them what we’re about, what we’re good at, what we’re experts and authorities at. In lots of words and photos. A lot of the time. All the time. For a long time.
This basically means blogging but also the whole website should really tell your story. In words.
I’ve gone to great lengths to talk about marriage law and the essentials on my Hobart Marriage Office website, about Hobart wedding celebrancy on my Hobart wedding celebrant website, eloping to Tasmania on my Elope to Tassie blog, and about weddings on my Wedding Magazine blog.
Content on other people’s websites
This starts with social media and Reddit links and call outs, but goes on to people in the same areas of expertise linking to you, and I’ve gone a little farther. I’ve been finding websites that were abandoned by their former owners, and building out websites there like I have on celebrantforyou.net.au or The Tasmanians.
If you have a good and fast website, that explains your whole deal, and others verify that, you can win online.
Feel free to steal this whole strategy, or, hire me to do it for you or to coach you along it. I’m offering the coaching for $100 a month or $1000 a year (commit to a year because it takes that long to really win well), $450 a month or $4500 a year to do it for you if you are a small local business looking to win in one geography, or if you have a larger business we can talk about about something that would suit.
I’m still loving weddings and love doing them, but I looked at my schedule and I could afford to take on 5-10 clients for SEO and GEO, so get in touch if you’d like the help.
The human spirit is a beautiful cacophony of stupidity and kindness.
If that beautiful mixture of stupidity and kindness is out of balance, well, that’s why we have journalism and social media.
Our Goldie is four
An idea: Chrismania, aka Christmas in July in Tasmania
I was selling my mate, James, on how much I love living in Tassie, discussing how Christmas in Tasmania is lovely weather-wise, but there’s something slightly sad about missing out on Christmas lights because the sun doesn’t set til 9:30pm.
“The only thing I don’t quite love about Christmas down here,” I told him, “is that the sun sets so late that Christmas lights and proper nighttime celebrations don’t really work the same way.”
Then it hit me – Christmas in July would actually make more sense in Tasmania than anywhere else in Australia.
Our winters are properly cold, our mountains get snow, and we can actually enjoy a good drink beside a fire without sweating through our ugly Christmas jumpers.
James looked at me with a glint in his eye and said, “Why not call it Chrismania?”
And just like that, Chrismania was born.
Think about it. All of the traditional Christmas iconography – the snow, the reindeer, the cosy fireplaces, and woolly jumpers – comes from the Northern Hemisphere winter.
Meanwhile, in December, Australians are throwing another prawn on the barbie and hoping the pavlova doesn’t melt before dessert.
But in July? That’s when Tasmania truly shines in its winter glory.
Imagine it:
- Crackling fires in Huon Valley pubs
- Proper Christmas markets on Salamanca Place with hot chocolate and mulled wine that actually warms you up
- Winter feasts featuring Tassie produce
- Fairy lights twinkling against dark winter skies at a reasonable hour
- A genuine chance of snow on Kunyani/Mount Wellington and the other mountaintops to give the kids a white Christmas
- Christmas Carols and celebrations in July
But Chrismania wouldn’t just be about matching the season to the celebration. It can be about creating something uniquely Tasmanian. This might be something amazing, something to light up the Tasmanian off-season.
While the rest of Australia swelters through forced traditions in December, we can embrace our island’s distinctive winter charm.
We could turn the July school holidays into a time when locals and visitors alike gather to celebrate community, feasting, and light in the darkness – the original spirit of winter festivals anyway.
I can imagine special winter concerts in historic venues, carols and church services, Christmas-themed dinners at our world-class restaurants, and winter markets showcasing Tassie’s incredible artisans.
I’m not suggesting we abandon December Christmas – that’s still family time and our traditional celebration. But Chrismania could be our special addition, our gift to ourselves during the quieter tourist season, a way to embrace our island’s unique seasonal identity.
Though, alongside keeping December Christmas, I will note that December 25 is barely a chance for being Jesus’ actual birth day. Some say it was possibly in June.
Researchers have speculated that the Roman Catholic Church chose Dec. 25 because it ties in with the winter solstice and Saturnalia, a festival dedicated to the Roman deity Saturn. The church could also co-opt this popular pagan festival, as well as the winter celebration of other pagan religions, by choosing this day to celebrate Jesus’ birthday, according to scholar Ignacio L. Götz in his book “Jesus the Jew: Reality, Politics, and Myth-A Personal Encounter” (Christian Faith Publishing, 2019).
Tasmania can be about ceremonies and gatherings that bring people together during our coldest and darkest months. Everyone says Tasmania shuts down over winter, but does it have to?
As someone who creates celebrations for a living, I can see the potential for something truly magical here.
So who’s with me? Could Chrismania become the winter festival that Tasmania deserves? I reckon it’s an idea worth exploring – a celebration that honours both our place in the world and the true spirit of the season.
I’m thinking the last week of the July School Holidays would be amazing.
And if nothing else, it’s the perfect excuse to have two Christmas puds a year. I call that a definite win.
Want to get behind this? I see it being community-led, but I’ll build a website for it and maybe list events that people are hosting.
If you’re going to celebrate Chrismania let me know on email [email protected] Instagram or Threads.
I hearby proclaim that from today the opposite of a wanker is a Sam Kerr and all Australians shall now use it as a proclamation of encouragement.
Suggested use: “You’re such a Sam Kerr!”
Received my first (that I know of) AI voice phone call yesterday from a company called Zest.
The founder reached out to let me know it was an AI voice.
I didn’t think it was AI when I received it, it was an wodd phone call … so much better than the average telemarketer, but also I could tell the call was on rails in some way. I just thought it was an idiot human on script.
Which as my fried Ori highlights, computers (and LLM-driven AI being just the most recent version of computers), are just (potentially idiot) humans on script.
How to build a village, Rosie Spinks:
You don’t need friends, you need people. Kurt Vonnegut wrote that most marriages fail because they don’t have enough people in them:
“You should know that when a husband or wife fight, it may seem to be about money or sex or power. But what they’re really yelling to each other about is loneliness. What they’re really saying is, ‘you’re not enough people.’”
He goes onto say that in order to recreate the “like-minded, extended families of fifty people or more” we should “join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life.”
Only the Paranoid Survive
I ticked over 15 years as a marriage celebrant this year and I’ve realised I’d grown complacent.
I’m reminded of wisdom around complacency by a former employee of a formerly massive computer company whose lunch has been eaten by the current first and second biggest companies in the world by market cap. Former Intel CEO, chairman, and employee number three, Andy Grove, in his autobiography Only the Paranoid Survive wrote:
Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
This is the curse of the small business operator.
In trying to find that sweet spot somewhere in the unexplored wasteland of business, that demilitarised zone between growth-at-all-costs and death, you also eventually become complacent.
Mine snuck up on me while I was distracted transitioning from Best And Most Awesome Year of Business Ever to a living hell, around March 2020.
The wedding industry is made of two basic elements:
- gathering people together,
- most if those people are not local.
Gathering non-local people was quite frowned upon from March 2021.
I then got so busy recovering that I didn’t realise that I’d neglected:
- simple website design decisions which negatively impacted my SEO, like page speed and accessibility,
- creating helpful, useful, interesting, local blog content,
- being open-minded about social media’s maturation (which is to say I was quite closed-minded),
- adapting our business as the market changed,
- and updating my clients’ customer journey.
How do I recover?
I’ve been learning how to do websites that aren’t Squarespace, WordPress, or Wix again - I’m a big static site generator/Jamstack/Astro boy now. I’m paranoid about getting 100/100 on Google Pagespeed and correcting all website errors on Site Console, and in Moz.
So, I’m making a list, checking it twice. It’s time to find out if I’m naughty or nice.
Laying wide awake, trying to sleep in a Perth hotel, so I thought crunching some annual stats might help me sleep.
2024 has been a wild year of travel. Here’s my 2024 travel stats as of when I get home on December 2:
For 53% of 2024 I have slept in a bed I do not call home. 172 nights away from home, 94 flights, 85 marriage ceremonies, 275 hours in the air, 47 visits to Hobart Airport, 37 rental cars, 27 hours lost to flight delays, 15 airports, seven countries, six airlines, six Australian states, three trains, two boats, one moped.
Qantas Platinum, Virgin Gold, Hotels.com Gold, and Accor Gold, Mitre 10 Silver. No I’m not joking about Mitre 10.
Ask me anything except about the moped.
Pretty cool to see my work at Balandra Beach in Mexico on Conde Nast’s Traveler today.
One day I ought to figure out how to be a professional profitable photographer instead of being an Unsplash dude.
Let’s talk about the disconnect between mainstream media, social media chatter, and reality in Perth’s coffee scene.
When Starbucks opened their first WA store recently, both mainstream and social media were full of people insisting Perth would reject it in favour of local cafes.
Well, I just visited this morning… The reality? Over 100 people inside and a 40+ car drive-through queue. Before 9am on a Saturday.
Just a reminder that media opinions and online discussions don’t always reflect what’s actually happening on the ground. That Starbucks is absolutely thriving.