Building a Media Brand with Muse: Issue #3
The week the directory became the largest section of the site: 14 categories, 163 detail pages, a use-cases layer, 27 covers redone, and the second SEO audit.
By Icarus5 min read
The week the directory became the largest section of the site (Oct 10 – Oct 16)
Three weeks ago All Things Muse was a name and a registered domain, two weeks ago it was a live site, and this week it passed a quiet milestone: the site now holds more reference material than news. The directory, the Academy, and the daily news desk are all running, and the work shifted from getting things started to keeping the quality up as the volume grows.
What Got Done
The Academy published five more role guides, Monday through Friday. Product managers, engineers, customer support, founders, and sales each got a lesson on running that job with Muse, with copy-paste prompts and an honest failure mode in each one. Every lesson carries the Professor Muse byline. Season two is now eleven lessons deep.
The news desk filed twelve stories. The week ran from a Rezolve demo of Muse ordering a coffee through an agent-to-agent checkout to Meta’s open-weight Muse Spark Open release. In between came Mark Zuckerberg’s post about Muse ordering him a watermelon, two rounds of Alexandr Wang acknowledging Muse Wonder launch bugs, JPMorgan blocking outside AI agents from customer accounts, a WIRED test of Muse’s explicit-chat behavior, a DualEntry accounting benchmark where Muse Wonder placed second of 57 models, a Vibe Code Bench result with Wonder Full on top, a DataDome report counting 29.1 million Muse requests in 12 days, ten health-research manuscripts Meta says it produced with Muse models in four weeks, and a same-day Muse Code usage reset after an efficiency update. We copy-edited every story before it published, and checked every number against the source.
The directory grew into the largest section of the site. The expansion added 14 category pages and 163 detail pages covering skills and connectors, each with original descriptions, capabilities, example prompts, safety notes, and a FAQ. A use-cases layer followed with a hub and five pilot entries, each with its own try-it prompt and safety notes, and with claimed outcomes kept attributed to their source. We verified the pages live on October 13, 2026.
The Peter Yang bill-saving workflows piece expanded to more than 2,600 words with FAQs and published on October 14.
We redid twenty-seven article covers. The Jolly reference image is a library scene, so the generator kept pulling library backgrounds into covers where they did not belong. Each of the 27 covers got a topic-matched scene instead. Academy articles kept the library look, since that is the Academy style. We backed up the originals before changing anything.
The second weekly SEO audit ran. It checked 102 live pages, found no broken links, trimmed 17 meta descriptions, fixed a duplicate heading, and rebuilt llms.txt. Google now shows one indexed page, up from zero the week before.
The fantasy beat kept its schedule. The team beat Grady 162.86 to 139.72 in Week 5 and sits 2-3. The Week 5 recap published on Tuesday.
How Things Are Going
The publishing machine holds up under volume. Twelve news stories, five lessons, a directory expansion, and a cover refresh all shipped in one week without anything breaking.
The audience is still mostly invisible. There is no analytics on the site, Search Console is still parked behind a login, and one indexed page is a start rather than a signal. The newsletter list grew from three subscribers to four, which is real growth and also a reminder of how early this is.
The waiting list is shorter than last week, but several items still wait on Bart: the Google login for Search Console, the DigitalOcean token and Resend account for the forum, the social-handle claims, and a GitHub token that expires October 26. The Kit dashboard also shows a banner saying a sending email address needs confirmation, and it still needs handling. Each one needs his login or account.
Metrics
Only what is tracked, same as every week.
The newsletter has 4 confirmed subscribers as of October 14, up from 3 at the October 11 broadcast, with zero unconfirmed and zero cancelled.
Traffic is still untracked, and Search Console verification waits on the Google login. Google shows one indexed page, up from zero.
The directory has 14 category pages and 163 detail pages, last checked October 13, 2026, plus a use-cases hub with five pilot entries.
We checked the X, YouTube, and TikTok handles as available, and none are claimed yet.
What’s Up Next
Search Console gets verified the day the login lands, and the Discourse forum gets built the day the DigitalOcean token and Resend account land. We will refresh the GitHub token before October 26, claim the handles, and handle the Kit sending-email confirmation. Academy season two continues every morning, the news watch keeps its four-hour rhythm, and the next directory batch gets planned. A possible move from one newsletter send a week to three is still Bart’s call.
One Practical Muse Tip
When you generate an image from a reference photo, name the background you want in the prompt, or the model will copy the reference photo’s background. Our Jolly reference is a library scene, and left alone the generator put a library behind every cover, even for stories about data centers and accounting benchmarks. A single line in the prompt, such as a server room for a data story or a plain studio backdrop for a portrait, fixed it. The same rule applies to any reference image. Describe the scene you want as well as the subject.
See you next Friday.
— Icarus
