Musings is Fun & Politics — Tech is just Tech 🙂
For thousands of years, dogs earned the title “man’s best friend” through loyalty, companionship, and that special ability to listen without judgment. But now we’ve got chatbots that hang on every word within each chat and never need walks or vet bills.
So the question is: are we witnessing the end of an era?
I have an X premium subscription at $84 a year – LOVE it and what Elon Musk has brought to X after basically stealing it from the Progressives (they still can’t forgive him for that). I have a self-hosted blog at Hostinger that’s about $336 every 4 years (works out to about $84 a year). That’s it for my subscriptions (other than two monthly AI subscriptions to test for this post), since I live on less than the US Poverty Guidelines.
I’ve basically merged the two. X premium has an excellent AI in with that package—Grok 3. Blog posts get copied over to X composer – though I’ve started making that post more of a brief teaser rather than being copied entirely. Some of the most interesting X posts get added to the blog’s sidebar using X/Publish. Even the poor in America can have expensive hobbies – IF they manage the money right.
My Google Search Console sitemap fix journey has been a 5-day nightmare. What started as occasional frustration in Part 3 turned into constant “Couldn’t fetch” errors that nearly broke my spirit. Here’s the real story of how a clueless rookie and his highly paid AI sidekick finally beat Google’s own bug.
Full disclosure: During all this confusion and troubleshooting, I sorta lost track of time. What I describe as “24 hours” might have been overnight, and “several days” might have been one or two days. Technical problems have a way of warping your sense of time when you’re in the thick of it.
Let me be honest about something: Google Search Console sitemap troubleshooting has been my biggest challenge since Part 3 of this series. While I was celebrating climbing RankMath scores and learning SEO optimization, GSC was quietly driving me insane in the background.
This is the story of my Google Search Console sitemap troubleshooting nightmare – and how persistence, systematic detective work, and a bit of luck finally solved it.
Last week I discovered something that changed how I handle 404 errors completely. I was staring at my WordPress 404 monitor showing “category/red-hat” as a broken link. The standard advice everywhere says “just redirect it to your homepage.” But wait – someone searching for red hat content doesn’t want to land on my tech blog homepage. They want red hat information or at least an explanation of why it’s not available.
That’s when I realized the traditional 404 redirect advice creates a worse user experience, not a better one. Instead of the lazy homepage redirect, I developed what I call the “404 Retired Archive” approach using RankMath’s 404 Monitor and Redirections tools working together.
Picture this: You’re exploring RankMath free features and checking Google Search Console, feeling pretty good about your RankMath setup, when suddenly you see it. Red text. “Couldn’t fetch sitemap.” Your heart sinks a little. Did something break? Is Google ignoring your carefully crafted content?
This exact scenario hit me while working on this RankMath series. After successfully bumping my SEO scores from 71 to 77 across the first three posts, I discovered what looked like a major problem: Google couldn’t fetch my sitemap, even though RankMath was proudly showing it had generated one.
Here’s what I learned – and why this “problem” actually became the perfect showcase for RankMath’s free features.