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An interactive visual guide to understanding paid search advertising on Google and Meta platforms.

Interactive Guide to Paid Search on Google and Meta This interactive tool walks you through the fundamentals of paid advertising on Google Ads and Meta Ads — covering campaign structure, ad auctions, quality signals, targeting, tracking pixels, key metrics, and bidding strategies. Pick a platform and explore. PAID ADVERTISING LEARNING LAB Each path covers structure, auction, targeting, pixels, metrics & bidding. G Google Ads Search · Display · Shopping M Meta Ads Facebook · Instagram · Reels You can switch platforms any time from inside the guide. G Google Ads M Meta Ads ← Back

Claude just launched interactive charts and diagrams in beta — I took it for a spin by visualizing S&P 500, Dow Jones, and federal deficit data by presidency.

Economy Performance by President: Testing Claude's New Interactive Charts Anthropic just launched a new beta feature in Claude — interactive charts and diagrams. Instead of static images or markdown tables, Claude can now generate fully functional, self-contained HTML dashboards with real interactivity. Tabs, tooltips, responsive layouts, dark mode — the works. I figured the best way to test it was to throw a real question at it: how have the S&P 500, Dow Jones, and federal deficit changed across every U.S. presidency in my lifetime? One prompt. One self-contained HTML file. No frameworks to install, no build step — just Chart.js loaded from a CDN and clean vanilla JavaScript. The result speaks for itself: Presidential economics dashboard S&P 500, Dow Jones, and federal deficit changes across every U.S. presidency since 1981. S&P 500 performance Dow Jones performance Federal deficit change Democrat Republican Trump II (partial term) Click through the tabs...

How We Built mattlsmith.com (And Why It’s Not 2006 Anymore)

Feb 27, 2025

A short tour of the stack behind this site—Astro, Fly.io, and the end of “just throw WordPress at it.”

Remember when “I want a blog” meant “install WordPress, pick a theme, and hope the shared host doesn’t fall over”? Those days aren’t gone everywhere, but they’re not how mattlsmith.com is built. Here’s what we’re actually using—and why it’s a lot more fun. The short version This site is static: pre-built HTML, CSS, and a little JS. No database, no PHP, no “is the server up?” at 2 a.m. It’s built with Astro, dressed up with the Spaceship theme (Svelte + Tailwind), and deployed on Fly.io every time we push to GitHub. No FTP. No cPanel. Just push, and a few minutes later the world gets the new version. > The whole pipeline: write in Cursor → push to GitHub → Fly builds and deploys. The “server” is basically a tiny container serving files. It’s almost disappointingly simple. The stack (the pretty part) So you can see at a glance...