Hey everybody and welcome to the Friday wrap up on Streamline Solopreneur. I'm your
host, Joe Casabona, and here's what's on my mind. For September 25th, 2026,
I am thinking of burning it all down. I'm doing a deeper writeup on this, but
I decided kind of on a whim this week to convert casabona.org, my longtime personal
site to a flat file site when it was WordPress. For 20 plus years,
this would've been impossible to do within two days, even a year ago. The amount
of planning required to convert a site, clean it up, and put a redirect or archival
structure in place to make sure literally thousands of links don't break, takes a
lot of time and effort
and testing,
and I was able to do it
pretty confidently pretty quickly
with not a ton of effort on my part though. These were all the important aspects
of it,
and
I've been thinking about doing this more, starting over without breaking everything,
which is maybe not the right use of the term, burn it all down.
But a few weeks ago, I wrote in my journal about my mailing list. Do I just burn
it all down and start over?
Much like my WordPress site, there is years of crust and and technical debt.
There are people on my list from my WordPress developer days, from the old days of
my podcast before I renamed it from my podcast and sponsorship coaching days.
How many people actually care
about what I'm talking about today?
I think this is a question worth exploring.
I often worry about the fallacy of the sunk cost. You don't wanna keep investing
into something that isn't working,
but you also don't want to burn everything down too soon
before you figure out if it actually has legs.
Switching cabo.org away from WordPress is something I have been thinking about for
two years,
but it's never been worth it from a time investment perspective.
Claude Code AI made it really easy because it basically did everything and I spot
checked and re and and fixed the plan and
did, did some of the, a lot of the architecture, but it did all of the grunt work,
the time consuming stuff from building the code for the new site to writing the migration
scripts, to creating the redirects
and testing those redirects.
The mailing list problem is something I've been thinking about for a months,
but this isn't any easier today than it would've been in the past because I need
to talk to my audience and find out the right focus for the newsletter and what resonates
with them.
AI can't tell me that,
despite what some people would say.
So yes, I'm thinking about burning a bunch of things down,
but not for the sake of it
and not if it's going to cost me more time than it saves. What do you think about
this? Let me know over@streamlinedfeedback.com. That's streamlined feedback.com with
a d.
you can write in or leave a voice note. I might even play it on the show.
Okay, up next, recommended reading
Apple's, MLB Dodgers live broadcast with shot with iPhone 18 Pro Max.
Basically this is saying Apple's last Friday night baseball broadcast of the year
was shot with the new iPhone 18 Pro Max, actually a bunch of them.
I'm a diehard baseball fan and I don't really like national broadcasts. The announcers
are speaking to a more general audience, not necessarily the people who watch every
game. I try to watch all 1 62
and as a result of this, they seem less knowledgeable than the local broadcasters,
and this isn't necessarily true. It might be true and some are just bad at it, and
you, you know, there's a struggle to
find the right on camera
talent for something like this,
but I also know that liking your local broadcast team is a form of Hom and I am very
aware that I suffer from that.
All of this is besides the point.
What is the point is that apple's broadcasts always look great,
and it's cool to see
them shoot live events on their pro phones.
They don't just tell you it's good enough to film TV in movies.
It actually is good enough to film TV in movies, and so they prove that by
shooting not just like
a,
a pre-recorded thing
that,
they can fix in the edit, right? I think
this is,
this is an important, like this is a weird flex. Not even a weird flex, it's just
a flex for them. They're shooting live events on their iPhone 18 pro that anybody
can buy, and a bunch of people did buy
So it's cool to see them putting their money where their mouth is
moving on to something fun. Italian music, specifically this Italian music playlist
I have, I rediscovered this playlist earlier this week. It's largely music from Italian
artists are in the Italian language, and I am revamping it because it's pretty thin
right now and it's several years old. It's in Apple Music and I am linking to the
Apple Music playlist so you can at least see what songs are on it.
I made this,
when I was trying to learn Italian, I was doing Duolingo, which I now feel is not
a very good method of learning languages.
but
I also wanted to kind of immerse myself in this and, and listen to some Italian language
music. So,
I, I, I made it when I was trying to learn Italian
something I pick up every couple of years and,
to be honest with you,
probably going to be time to try that again soon.
Okay, now let's move on to something to help you with your systems. I made a stream
deck plugin this week
called Q for Apple Music, QCUE, not q, the letter q.
it was brought to my attention,
on one of my YouTube videos that the Apple Music Stream deck plugin I use that was
made by El Gado is no longer available. And that's a huge bummer
'cause it's one of my favorites. It's such a crucial plugin for me. I much prefer
having dedicated buttons on my stream deck for Apple Music
as opposed to
just using the keyboard media keys, which other apps can hijack, right? There's like
nothing worse than like music is playing and you opened up YouTube, but you forgot
about it, and then you push the, the pause button and instead of the music stopping,
the music is still playing and that YouTube video is playing. So I like having the
dedicated buttons and
because this plugin is no longer a avail, it's just like completely, it was wiped
off the face of the earth,
El Gado as far as I can tell, quietly removed it.
so I decided just in case
it stopped working somewhere down the line,
I decided to replace it with my own version of it.
so I used cloud code to create a new and improved replacement.
it has all of the features of the now defunct Elga Ado plugin, so,
play pause buttons,
and then the kind of tracking buttons, right, the
previous and next buttons.
the ability to turn on shuffle and favorite,
songs,
but I also added
a repeat button that will cycle through repeat all, repeat next and turn off.
And,
uh,
my personal favorite feature,
which is the ability to map a button directly to a playlist so I I don't have to
go hunting for it. So,
you pick the playlist
and then you choose if you want it to shuffle or not. You press the button and that
playlist starts playing. I love this. It is, it makes it so much easier to play the,
the music I likely want to play. And you can add as many playlist buttons. You just
have a whole page of playlist buttons if you want.
I also added support for the dials on the stream deck plus and plus Excel. I picked
up the plus XL this week. I'll probably talk about that next week. But,
so there is volume control. And then
Claude named this transport, I guess this is like an old term from the tape deck
days, but
it, it is the control button, so you push it to play or pause, and then you turn
it to go to the previous or next track. So really love this. This would've been impossible
for me without Claude Code, and these sort of utilities are
such a great use of AI
using AI to speak its native language, to reduce friction in your life. And I know
I've already talked about this on this show,
but this is something that's often on my mind and probably something I am going to
talk about a lot more in the coming weeks because I think
knowing when to build little utilities for yourself
is, is an increasingly important skill, right?
circling back to WordPress, I I, I used WordPress basically from the time it came
out
and
it did democratize publishing, right? Like after that blogging exploded,
right? As technology gets easier to use for more people, the medium explodes. And
now we are kind of seeing the same thing with native apps
or web apps
where anybody can tell
AI to build it for them and it builds it for them. So I'm, I'm thinking a lot about
this, but this is, that's for another episode. So wrapping up here,
a lot of the things I did this week were really focused on saving me time.
What would you do with an extra 25 hours each month?
This is what I help business owners figure out,
and then I make it happen for them. My client, Annie, spends more time with her kid.
My client Laura, has soup with her aging mother every day. My client Paolo serves
his community better and shows up for his four kids
better because of the work we did together.
Maybe you have dreams of writing a book, volunteering at an organization that means
a lot to you, or spending more time with your family, touching some grass. If you
want,
I can help
book a free strategy, call over at streamlined fm slash wrap
that's streamlined with
ad fm slash wrap w
book your call, and we will talk about how we can save you 25 hours each month.
That's it for this episode of the Friday wrap up on Streamline Solopreneur. Thanks
so much for listening, and until next time, I hope you find some space in your weekend.
