2023 was a busy year so I did not spend a lot of time blogging, unfortunately.

It was only in December that I had meaningful time for writing.

In the 2022 review I set a few targets for the blog in 2023:

Targets for 2023

• ❎ Publish at least 40 posts
  • 14
• ✅ Reach at least 150k readers
  • With a couple of viral posts this is very easily achievable. I’m at 180k even though I only had a few posts. I will include a target for the number of posts as well.

• ❎ Get at least 10 posts professionally? publicized

  • I was thinking of hiring someone to help me distribute the content, but

    a) I didn’t produce much of it and

    b) I didn’t hire anyone.

• ❎ Build an audience (recurring readers, Twitter, newsletter?)
  • Did not do this at all.
• ❎ Publish something on at least two other sites
  • Did not do this. And I think I will not focus on this going forward.

Quantity

I published 14 posts, totaling approximately 9700 words. The average blog post length is 695 words.

Working on legacy code is the longest post at ~729 words, followed by Lie still in bed with 679.

The sample size isn’t sufficient to comment on whether the average length is adequate.

Popularity

Lie still in bed was the most popular substantial article. That’s encouraging because it’s not about tech, it’s just generic advice.

MIT No AI was fairly popular but got flagged on HackerNews which killed it. It was also very quick to write.

Interestingly Reddit’s disrespectful design and Big tech should help tackle misinformation on smaller platforms made a comeback. I don’t have detailed tracking anymore, it’s all based on server logs, so I can’t dig deeper into where the traffic is coming from.

Editing the source markdown of a generated static site in the browser had some traffic as well which is interesting. It’s probably the most interesting post I wrote in a long while.

Feedly reports 18 followers. Up three.

What I’ve learnt

I think I got better at writing more clearly.

I’m more comfortable, at least at the moment, with publishing posts and not worrying too much about whether they’re perfect. I think that’s at least partly because I wrote so many posts in December.

I made one pass with the rough draft. Then another pass that finalized the content. Then a final one where I didn’t change the content but just proofread and ensured clarity. Then I published the post.

I took to heart the 2022 objective to frame posts positively more positively and have done that for several of them.

Targets for 2024

• Publish at least 40 posts
• Reach at least 200k readers
• Have at least 6 posts on the front page of something
• Make at least $50 from writing.
  • I’m not sure if this is a good objective but maybe it might motivate me to think of monetization alternatives.