Traffic
When John Gruber linked my piece on unscientific laptop repair numbers just before Thanksgiving, traffic at tumbledry jumped significantly. It was fun to finally, truly test my homebrew website code (when Gruber links a site, the traffic tends to crash the site of interest) — I’m happy that the code I wrote can survive a decently large torrent of traffic. How large? Year over year on November 24, traffic here was up 30,000%.
It’s fun to attract that many eyeballs. One would imagine that more readers is only a good thing, but it can put you in a box. For example, I realized that pandering to the demographics of the visitors in that burst would keep a steady flow of folks stopping by. But boxing myself in to one single topic didn’t feel right at all. If I write tumbledry for my visitors and not for me, I’ll never achieve the authenticity, passion, and magnetic style of prose I’m always reaching for but never quite attaining.
I realized I’m still finding my voice. It’s been about 10 years since I began my personal website experiment, and I still don’t quite know how I want to do this. The only thing I know for sure: I’m never going to stop.