The future of this blog

This week I added a visitor counter. I thought it would be a fun throwback to the old days. It’s now already at over 100 visitors. Do I actually have that many visitors? Probably not. I don’t track anything other than the hashed IP, so I can only assume it’s bot traffic. Maybe there’s the occasional random visitor, but it’s pretty quiet. No emails or new guestbook entries. I know a friend and my girlfriend read the blog, so in a way I’m writing for them. But I also enjoy writing just for myself.

Still, I’m feeling somewhat jaded seeing that visitor counter at 100. I started building websites as a teenager, and I distinctly remember that my personal homepage reached 40 visitors at some point. I felt so happy and honored that so many people visited my website back then. Now, I get hundreds of visitors in less than a week, but I know they’re just bots scraping my content to feed an LLM.

Part of why I started this blog was to contribute to the small, personal web. I can’t help but feel a bit disillusioned. Sure, there are many active small websites, and I still enjoy visiting them. I also still enjoy having one. But I have to accept that the feeling is different now than when I built my first homepage.

In three weeks, 2025 will be over, and with that also my challenge of blogging at least once a week. I will keep blogging next year, but maybe not weekly anymore. At least not all the time. I still like having this small corner of the internet for myself. As for the visitor counter, I’ll probably remove it or find a way to filter out the bots.