246 words, 2 min read
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I have a weird relationship with statistics: on one hand, I try not to look at it too often. Maybe once or twice a year. It’s because analytics is not actionable: what difference does it make if a thousand people saw my article or ten thousand?
I mean, sure, you might try to guess people’s tastes and only write about what’s popular, but that will destroy your soul pretty quickly.
On the other hand, I feel nervous when something is not accounted for, recorded, or saved for future reference. I might not need it now, but what if ten years later I change my mind?
Seeing your readers also helps to know you are not writing into the void. So I really don’t need much, something very basic: the number of readers…
246 words, 2 min read
⚠️ This post links to an external website. ⚠️
I have a weird relationship with statistics: on one hand, I try not to look at it too often. Maybe once or twice a year. It’s because analytics is not actionable: what difference does it make if a thousand people saw my article or ten thousand?
I mean, sure, you might try to guess people’s tastes and only write about what’s popular, but that will destroy your soul pretty quickly.
On the other hand, I feel nervous when something is not accounted for, recorded, or saved for future reference. I might not need it now, but what if ten years later I change my mind?
Seeing your readers also helps to know you are not writing into the void. So I really don’t need much, something very basic: the number of readers per day/per article, maybe, would be enough.
Final piece of the puzzle: I self-host my web projects, and I use an old-fashioned web server instead of delegating that task to Nginx.
Static sites are popular and for a good reason: they are fast, lightweight, and fulfil their function. I, on the other hand, might have an unfinished gestalt or two: I want to feel the full power of the computer when serving my web pages, to be able to do fun stuff that is beyond static pages. I need that freedom that comes with a full programming language at your disposal. I want to program my own web server (in Clojure, sorry everybody else).
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