Unmeasured

When I migrated this site to Wordpress in 2006 I also enabled Google Analytics to track who was linking to me and which pages were popular.

13 years later, it’s time to accept that I don’t actually care. As long as I keep URLs consistent incoming links are safe. In the early twenty-aughts I cared about the popularity of my “content” but social media formalized that attention-seeking and gradually killed my interest in it.

Today, I would prefer to not know who is visiting this site. I’m aware my “audience” is small in any venue, and a personal web site is hardly a major media outlet. I no longer expect even friends and family will read anything here unless it is also cross-posted to some social netework. This encourages me to focus on posting here for my own benefit.

So I have removed Google Analytics and a not replacing it. The only way I will notice traffic to this site as currently configured is if Netlify informs me I’m over their 100GB monthly bandwidth quota.

In case I regret this in the future, though, here were the “top performing” posts to this point:

• Pointing at the TV saw over 10k visitors the day it was fireballed
• Premature optimization is the root of all evil gets a steady stream from Wikipedia
• Om Asatoma Sadgamaya (ॐ असतो मा सद्गमय), based on when I had comments here, is found by many looking for the Pavamana Mantra.
• Piggers are number one also gets a lot of search traffic
• Bus Driver Appreciation Day is linked from a few places as the origin of TDAD