Hi, I’m Max. There’s not too much here, but maybe you’ll get more of what you want if you:
- Find me on Bluesky, which I’m trying to use more in place of Twitter, which I can’t quite leave behind.
- Stalk me in a more professional way on LinkedIn.
- Email hi [at] maxjohns.nz.
- Work out the very cunning way I disguise my identity when I make very lo-fi music at home.
A few of the things I’ve written
So long as these links still work, you can see my words in places like:
- MyHost’s blogs in New Zealand and Australia, where the expert interview series let me profile cool people like Adem Cifcioglu and Ash Nallawalla.
- SiteHost’s blog, where I dive into geeky things like domain pricing and government-compliant hosting.
- Hamilton Underground Press, where I reviewed local band Bitter Defeat’s first EP and interviewed touring artists like the ridiculous-but-amazing Bob Log III. Link rot report: HUP is doing its best to survive, but get in while you can.
- The Cloudways blog, where I did things like explain how we’d speed test competing servers. Link rot report: Cloudways is smart enough to update articles over time, so some evergreen pieces will look less and less like my originals as time passes.
- Jade Software publications like this 2016 ebook for lines companies and this opinion paper about bimodal IT in the insurance industry (both PDFs).
- Red Wagon Solutions, where I ghost-wrote advice for new CEOs. Link rot report: My articles here have moved once or twice already, leaving only 404s at their old locations. Last updated March 2023. Good luck.
- Advanced Piping Solutions, where I wrote about such hot topics as HDPE extrusion welding.
- The Silverlined, a short-lived website designed to give digital professionals some interesting work-related things to read during covidtimes. My piece, Zooming Into a Future That Doesn’t Suck, was a long-ish read about what happens when new technology gets widely adopted and how designers can help it not suck. Link rot report: At last check the article is still up but an image has disappeared, ruining a decent joke about bad change.org petitions.
- Back issues of Otago Uni’s student magazine, Critic, where my ASPA-award winning column, ‘The Wrong Guy in the Wrong Lecture’ ran about two decades ago. As far as I know, these are available only at the Hocken Library. Thank God.
What about that other thing you used to do, Max?
Hmm. Maybe you’re looking for:
- My old content strategy website, Content Is The Web.(contentistheweb.com), which I’ve archived at citw.maxjohns.nz
- No Timing, No Structure which isn’t officially an archive yet, but is very slow-moving because it has no real purpose.
- Auckland Content Strategy Meetup, which is now in the hands of a different team of organisers.
- #CoverWeakly, which ran out of steam because after we found The Joker by Everclear we knew that the search was over. That’s why it’s first on the playlist.
- Content Strategy, Simplified, which was a consultancy/side-hustle that I was surprisingly happy to retire a few years ago.
No, none of those things. Are you sure you’re Max Johns?
Well, yeah, but there might be others.
If it helps, I’m the Max Johns who looks like this:
