Thanks for the Referrals

May 3, 2025

When you are analyzing your webite traffic, one of the most important pieces of data is the referrals. By monitoring the sources of traffic to your site, you can optimize your advertising efforts for maximum growth and engagement.

Ugh. How can anybody bear to write that kind of crap? It’s revolting. Here’s some advice for you advertisers: when your sense of taste rebels against the copy you’re writing, that’s a sign that you should not write it. Don’t use an LLM to do it. Recognize that it should not exist.

More seriously, I do like looking at the referrals¹ on my posts. Since I’m a tiny little blog, I don’t get much traffic from search engines. The main way people find my posts is when other people link to them on their own blogs. Now, I like to think that I’m a cool person, and by extension, that my website is cool. Therefore, people who put up links to it on their sites are probably cool too. It’s not a perfect heuristic, but good enough is good enough.

So when I see a new site pop up in my logs, I go and check it out. More often than not it is a cool blog. I’ve added a number of feeds to my RSS reader that way.

Thanks everyone, one for the links and two for letting me know about you and three for making neat stuff.

Replies to this post:

This is off topic from the post, but I will forever rue that the mispelling “referer” is permanently enshrined in http. It literally says ‘(sic)’ in the standard. Arrgh. ↩︎

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