One of my past posts, “A Safari aspect-ratio CSS Bug”, has had very steadily growing traffic to it for a few months now. Mostly from Google, as a given, but ChatGPT, Claude, & Perplexity are all in there as referring domains too.
To be clear, I’m pretty pleased with this! I’m happy that people are continuing to find my work useful, and glad that I bothered to write down my solution 9 months ago. But, it’s not like I really do any marketing for this thing? This (LinkedIn wall sorry) doesn’t count. So, it’s all just the algorithms out there deciding my words are tasty & serving it up to people of their own accord. My curiousity cannot be sated...
One of my past posts, “A Safari aspect-ratio CSS Bug”, has had very steadily growing traffic to it for a few months now. Mostly from Google, as a given, but ChatGPT, Claude, & Perplexity are all in there as referring domains too.
To be clear, I’m pretty pleased with this! I’m happy that people are continuing to find my work useful, and glad that I bothered to write down my solution 9 months ago. But, it’s not like I really do any marketing for this thing? This (LinkedIn wall sorry) doesn’t count. So, it’s all just the algorithms out there deciding my words are tasty & serving it up to people of their own accord. My curiousity cannot be sated. Why?
Hypotheses For Why Algorithms Like It
- It’s very short
- It’s very structured
- It efficiently answers “How Do I Do X?” which may be the exact question the user has typed in
I didn’t really optimize for these things when writing that post, it just sorta ended up that way. But! Those turned out to be pretty good properties to have in a post regardless, even if you’re not an algorithm. To test these hypotheses, I would need to write more blog posts, but alas, i am merely a channel for the energies of the divine muses, & their whims r fickle. anyways
Why I Like It
- It’s interactive
- It includes not only the what, but a plausible explanation for the why, helping you learn something about browsers/CSS after you finish reading/experimenting
Neither of these are things you get by reading the AI output1. Which is why I’m glad that people actually clicked thru to the source! I like writing these posts for people, so I hope the state of things will be “peope use AI to find the posts” and not “the AIs read the posts & tell the people what was in the posts”, tho sometimes it seems we’re headed in the latter direction, ah well.
Footnotes
In a perfect world: yes the perfect AI assistant could do both. But we do not live in a perfect world. The common assistants don’t do arbitrary HTML/CSS-injected demos (good!!!), and the summaries will miss the subtleties of what’s going on in this article. Please just read the original it’s so short. ↩