2024 Writing Retrospective

Another wild and wacky year is wrapping up, and with it the customary year end wrap up/retrospective. This year I posted a total of 11 posts¹, two being update/revised posts and nine standalone posts. My longest post (by far) was my revised microblogging comparison post at 15,411 words^{2 3}, and my shortest was my pickles/sauerkraut recipe post at 722 words (the only post under 1k words). My average post length was 4991 words, my median post length being a similar 5169 words.

As for post genres I had one complaint/ranty post, that being my post about browsers. I had two posts that were updates to/revisions of a previous post, three posts that were instructional or explained my process of doing something, and five posts talking about either things I found interesting or covered the results of me experimenting with a particular thing.

What and Why?

Like I mentioned last year, my writing is a creative outlet. I enjoy writing, and not knowing many technical people with similar interests IRL, it’s a place to ramble on about things that interest or annoy me in the technical world.

Again, like last year, I enjoy reading and writing longer posts. It’s a great chance to delve into something deeply, getting personal perspectives and information on a topic from somebody interested. While highly subjective, I feel like many shorter posts would often be better suited as social media posts rather than blog posts - which is why I’m a fan of larger/no character limits on Nostr & some Activity Pub servers. A 200 something character limit is really limiting and prevents a lot of that, but I feel like a lot of under 1k blog posts work well as a distilled 400-800 word social media post⁴.

Again, like last year, my favorite blogs also follow a similar pattern - a longer post on a weekly/monthly basis. Nothing is better than opening my blogs folder in my RSS reader, having not checked it in a bit, to see a short list of posts with some substance and no long list of short posts cluttering the feed. Again, though, it’s all super subjective, and there’s nothing wrong with treating blogs more like a social media platform instead of a personal op-ed platform - just my personal preference.

Traffic

Cloudflare offers some basic statistics, and in the last thirty days I’ve had ~3.5k unique visitors, up by about 1k from when I checked it last year. While it might be nothing in terms of big websites or social media numbers, it’s pretty crazy to think that more than three thousand people⁵ decided to check out my random ramblings in the last thirty days.

As I’ve said before, seeing traffic from many non-English speaking countries is also super cool. That some people consider my content worth reading in their non-native tongue is neat.

Random Happenings

My original microblogging protocols post went kinda viral this spring. I posted it, shared it on Nostr and Activity Pub - in which I got a couple likes/replies on Nostr and none on Activity Pub - and then went on with my day. Sometime in the spring I logged into Cloudflare to do something and saw a big spike in traffic, but didn’t put too much thought into it. Sometime in the summer I was bored and decided to run a backlink checker service, only to find it was shared a fair bit - eventually making it into the O’Riley Trends newsletter. That was super cool.

I also found my blog in some blog rolls. Once or twice I came across them naturally by browsing sites I was on, the rest coming up with the backlink checkers. It’s always a double take randomly coming across a link to my site in the wild. I also had some emails, a Nostr message or two, and posts on Hacker News when somebody shared my microblogging post that have either provided corrected information and/or just been a kind message - all of which have been greatly appreciated.

I found a link to my blog on the darkest of the deep web: the second page of Bing. I was trying to find out how many PDSs were self hosted on AT Proto, and after searching on a few search engines I wound up on my own site. Now, of course I was searching for information, therefore it’s not going to be in my own writing, but it was a cool find.

I started working on a novel. I’ve never penned a sentence of fiction before this, so it’s a very amateur work with a bit of a wacky plot, but it’s free to read and share so there’s very little investment needed to read.

A couple of months ago I created a photos page on my site to share a few photos I’ve taken⁶. It’s nothing too special, just a few photos I’ve taken that I wanted to share. Since setting up the page I’ve already added two images, and in proper make-it-more-complicated-than-it-has-to-be fashion, I added them to the middle of the gallery instead of the end. I’ll probably continue to add pictures occasionally, and at some point might add another category of heavily edited photos.

Last, a week or so before this (presumably) goes live, I started mirroring my blog on I2P. If you’re on I2P you can read everything here 1:1 on a privacy respecting protocol that doesn’t rely on ICANN or even require an open port to host content.

Future Posts

A few post ideas I may end up posting in the future.

• I might write up a review on my old phone (G Pixel 5a), new phone (G Pixel 8a), and a mystery phone.
• I’ll probably update my defaults post. I have made some changes to what software I use and already have the updated post partially drafted.
• I might do a post comparing jxl and avif, and probably also ramble on about my favorite compression algorithms in general.
• I will probably make a microblogging protocols compared v3 at some point. There have already been some changes to the ecosystem since I posted the updated version 6 months ago, and the post could benefit from being slimmed down and re-organized.
• I might make a post detailing what I did to mirror my site in I2P.
• Last, I might make a post about migrating playlists on VLC for Android. Having upgraded phones a bit back it was a huge pain, and there’s no official support for doing so. I found a script that lets you extract playlists from VLC’s database and copy things over, but information on how to do so (outside of that script) is pretty much nil⁷. It’s random, but if I write a dedicated post and search engines pick it up, it might save some people some headache. They have a pull request open on VLC’s git repo to add support for doing so, but it’s been open for seven years. Seven. Years.