Holy cow it’s June already‽
Activities & Writing &c.
I started the month of with a good streak of posts. I had a notion to do #WeblogPoMo, but never quite committed to it. That’s fine. I am already happy with the rate of posting I have. I don’t think I need to force myself to step it up. (As a matter of fact, I can’t find anyone this year posting anything under that tag.)
There were a few posts that “escaped containment” as it were and got some responses from across the web. Thanks for the referrals and How I Drink My Coffee . It was really fun to hear how other people like their coffee. Making it is so often a ritual, and so it’s a little peek into their lives.
I went to go see the movie Sinners on the recommendation of a coworker. That was very good and I’m not even a horror buff. I recommend it.
The last couple of months I did a whole little table of the most popular posts. I think I’m going to stop that. Or at least take a break. It’s just a way of brooding on numbers in the end. I do too much of that already, and it’s not very useful. Now, “useful” is also a wrong way to think about things here—none of this site is made with “usefulness” in mind. Ditto “productive.” The denotations of those words are fine, but they pull in connotations that I don’t want: of bus(i/y)ness, of industriousness, of hustling and grinding. Bah! I say this, but I still check my stats almost every day. They are not big numbers, but they are climbing bit by bit.
I do think I found an actually interesting way to use my view stats. I added a little new feature to the bottom of all my posts: a random article link. But this does not actually take you to a completely random post here, it specifically chooses from the least viewed posts here. That’s the advantage of making things yourself, you can do custom, idiosyncratic things like that.
I’m going to make a quick digression about software optimization here. That random link is the slowest function on my site right now. It has some obvious inefficiencies. But I’m not going to fix it right now. Because in context, in real life, “slowest” means it takes a little more than 1 millisecond. And that’s on the cheapest, puniest server I could find. I am simply not worried about it.
In spite of what I just said about the word, it was a productive month for me. I wrote a good number of posts.
I also started a new side project. I’m planning to use it with this website, but it is intended to not be as tied to it as some of the other code I’ve been writing lately. It has to do with Webmentions .I’ve set up this site to recieve them, but what I don’t have is a way to send them when I link to somebody. The new project is going to fix it. The advantage of building things yourself is that you get to choose how they work. The disadvantage is that you have to do everything yourself. The project is over on my github , though it is not finished or functional yet. Looking at options for hosting a git server here on my site is on my todo list, but it remains to be seen how involved a project that will be. The indie web is cool and all, but I do have my limits on how much I want to maintain—I’m not interested in running my own email, for one.
Links
Sometimes you’re just reading a casual post about poking around some local museums and you get hit with an idea like this:
It reminded me of how so much of our historical archives are preserved not because we’ve collectively invested in formally preserving our history, but because a small ad hoc group of committed folks proactively took it upon themselves to do so. It’s primarily a grassroots affair, only occasionally bolstered
Every Site Needs a Links Page . Indeed. And this will make a fine addition to mine.