Week in Review: SEO Pages, a Stupid Popup, and Fewer Analytics Headaches

32 commits this week and a surprising amount of them were about search, structure, and one deliberately stupid growth mechanic.

english-exercises.org

The main work was server-rendered SEO enrichment across 15 sub-exercise pages.

That included:

• moving breadcrumbs to the top
• removing duplicate headers
• making wrapper content behave properly
• cleaning up business vocabulary pages

This is the sort of work that doesn’t look like much in screenshots but absolutely changes whether a page feels crawlable, readable, and worth indexing.

I also centralised a background colour variable, which sounds deeply unexciting until you’ve changed the same colour in four different places one time too many.

Then there was the popup.

I added a floating “Don’t Press This” prompt to push traffic toward Impossible English.

Childish? Yes.

Effective enough that I kept it? Also yes.

On the analytics side I cut Amplitude event volume by about 85% so I could stay inside the free tier without the tracking setup behaving like a teenager with unlimited text messages.

Lesson Planning

Lesson-planning got more student profiles, more rebuilt lessons, and a bit more order around the full roster.

It is still a very alive system. Which is a polite way of saying it keeps growing new limbs.

Firstly Academy

Firstly had only a couple of commits this week, but they were decent ones:

• WhatsEnglish schema migration work
• better Fluency Gym sentence quality so the generated practice stops sounding odd

What I Took From It

There are weeks for big launches.

Then there are weeks where you make pages easier to find, analytics cheaper to run, and tiny bits of copy weird enough that people click them.

Honestly I like those weeks too.