Blog update 9/16

I’ve gotten lazy recently with my writing. My system of breaking down my writing organically into posts, chicken-scratch, and zettels hasn’t worked out how I’d want it to. I ended up producing a lot of draft zettels (little atomic learning notes), and not much else.

For a while, I got really demotivated from writing. Who cares? Nobody is reading it anyway. I do enjoy writing intrinsically, and it helps a lot to document my progress on the things I’m working on, and give me clarity via reflection and filtering.

Looking back on the past year, and last 90 days, the post I spent the most effort on, keyboard warrior, unsurprisingly had the most views.

I put a lot of sustained effort into that post, far more than I thought I would, and the ‘preparation’ of thinking about it to the point of publication was almost two years in the making.

But now I want to keep going. Looking at the analytics months later, it isn’t great, but it’s baffling to me anybody would bother visiting my site. Ten views a day? I write my posts primarily for myself, and if there’s one more reader, that’s a cherry on top.

Random

• I get spam emails, asking to advertise ‘guest blog posts’ on my meager site. I assume bots crawl the internet everywhere to do this.

• I also get real emails that validate people are reading, are at least glancing. Almost a year ago, I figured out how to download lectures off a site, and I got an email from someone asking me more about it!

• With the right keyword search, some of my stuff actually gets on the first page of google. I’m getting five-to-ten views a day

• It’s interesting to out of the other stuff what gets views and what doesn’t. Sometimes I’m just trying to document something, other times I want to explore an interesting topic, and it feels like views can be gamed by picking niche topics that nobody has written much about. In that case, there’s a guarantee of at least one reader (myself). This was the case for keyboard warrior.

What’s next?

• I’ve wanted to get my hands wet making videos. Make a YouTube video, related or to augment a blog post.

• I’ve wanted to build a better blog system from within hugo, or one from scratch. I had lots of ideas for a better system, such as line references (like line of code references on github), and a knowledge graph to connect the posts

• Promote posts more when written, would like to share, mainly for feedback

• Would like to start using the mailing list to update readers monthly or even quarterly. It’s also great to keep myself accountable.