Lifing Hard

There's a new button showing up on signup pages, and it's worth understanding even if you'll never use it. OpenAI's help page for Sign in with ChatGPT names the first participating partners: Airtable, GitLab, HubSpot, Notion, Supabase and Vercel. When someone signs into one of those apps with their ChatGPT account, the app gets their name, email address and profile picture. It does not get their chats, memory, files or billing data, and anything more requires a separate permission. OpenAI began rolling it out with those partners in its July 29 release notes. The September 29 notes added "Sign in to other products with ChatGPT" for signed-in users. For now, other developers can only fill out an interest form. So most businesses can't add this button yet. That's fine. The interesting part isn't the button. It's what the button tells you about your customers. People are tired of typing Every login button that exists, from Google to App...

Digiday reported on October 1, 2026 that some agencies running ChatGPT Ads are seeing the platform's numbers disagree with their own tracking. We used that story to put together a tracking check any small business can run in an afternoon, using Google's own instructions. Okay, so this one got my attention. An agency in the UK ran a lead generation campaign on ChatGPT Ads and watched the form fills come in. Two weeks later, the platform still showed zero conversions. That same agency, Accuracast, saw ChatGPT report around 100 clicks while its own tracking picked up 20. That's from Digiday's October 1 report on why ChatGPT Ads budgets are stuck at test level. Another agency, Web Guide Partner, told Digiday that conversions do show up on ChatGPT, just 24 to 36 hours late, against a few hours on Google. And to be fair to OpenAI, not everyone sees a problem. AdRoll, Jellyfish and an independent US agency said they hadn't found click gaps, and OpenAI declined to commen...

A guide for small business owners to dofollow and nofollow links, paid link offers, and the list Google publishes about link spam. If you own a business with a website, you may have seen an email offering high authority dofollow backlinks, guaranteed, at a low price. Google has written down two things that are worth knowing before you reply. "Dofollow" is not a feature The word makes it sound like something extra you're paying for. A dofollow link is an ordinary link with no label on it. Google's own guidance says a regular link needs nothing added: "you don't need to add a rel attribute." The labels that do exist are rel="nofollow", which tells Google the site isn't vouching for the page it links to, and two added in September 2019: rel="sponsored" for ads and paid placements, and rel="ugc" for links in comments and forum posts. An offer that promises "dofollow" is promising a link without the label that ...

Between July 1 and September 28, 2026, 969 businesses listed a start date with the City of Sacramento. We counted them by type from the city's own records and compared them with the same weeks of 2025. Sacramento doesn't issue a general business license. Every business that operates in the city pays a Business Operations Tax instead, and the city publishes the list of those accounts on its open data portal, updated daily. Each record includes a business type and the date the business started. So on September 29, 2026, we pulled every account with a start date from July 1 through September 28, and the same 13 weeks of 2025. 969 businesses started in those 13 weeks this year, against 1,073 in the same weeks last year. Consultants led , with 62. Restaurants had 21, so there were nearly three new consultants for every new restaurant. Medical offices jumped from 5 to 25, the largest rise on the list. General services fell from 52 to 31, the largest drop. One caution before th...

One in five local business listings in Orange County shows no website and no email address. That is 21,074 of the 110,088 listings we counted in the open map data that apps and websites can build on. We pulled every Orange County place from the September 23, 2026 release of Overture Maps, an open dataset of places around the world, and counted what appeared on each local business listing: a phone number, a website, an email address or a Facebook page. The county at a glance What the listing shows Listings Share A phone number 95,671 87% A website 87,367 79% A Facebook page 35,498 32% An email address 24,539 22% No website and no email 21,074 19% No website, no email and no phone 6,855 6% A phone number is the most common way to reach a business in this data, and an email is the least common. Only 481 listings include an Instagram link, compared with 35,498 with a Facebook page. In this dataset, Facebook accounts for almost all social links. By industry Industry Listings Website P...

Meta shipped Muse on September 8 and every write-up since has been about the same thing: can it book your travel, can it fill in your forms, how fast is it. I spent a week giving it real work, and the part that actually impressed me was not the agent at all. It was what happens to your passwords. They never reach the model. How it actually works Meta's own documentation is specific about this. Credentials go into a Secure Credentials Store. Muse completes an authorized action without the model ever seeing the password, including passwords you type into the browser yourself. The real credentials get injected at the network boundary by a separate agent called Sentinel, which lives outside Muse's main runtime and acts as the permission authority for connector actions and network traffic. The model can propose an action. It cannot authorize one. Sit with what that means. If the model is ever prompt-injected, tricked by a malicious page, or simply confused into attempting something ...