Creating this website

I setup a domain and started working on my homepage today. I never owned a domain before, kind of cool.

Working on my website for the whole day again. So fun.

Working on my website for the whole day again. I’m making a lot of progress with it, but one thing I didn’t expect is that the more I add pages, the harder it becomes to connect them the way I originally visioned. I wanted a graph without no loop that you explore, but like 30% of the nodes are currently unconnected. Because for the 70% I could figure out some “logical” or funny connection, it now seems like I need to apply that same attention to detail to the remaining (and growing) 30%.

I can feel like there are some big “clusters” that if added would make the graph better connected and otherwise better, but I realized I haven’t actually written about many of my particular interests, so I would have to write about them now. And I did write several such pages and it was great, just a rather slow process.

So I’m thinking I should probably aim to release this in a very “intermediate” state — I suppose in reality no one will even be reading it. Still, I would like to see it’s at least somewhat coherent, and an interesting “experience” for the readers who happen to find it. So that means editing out my worst tendencies, cutting out the stuff that isn’t quite interesting enough, and also making the content more rounded, as now it’s too 4chan/humor heavy I think.

The reason for that is that the memes were the easiest to add is I already had the images collected and almost all of them stand on their own. In contrast, every piece of writing requires collecting the related things scattered across the dailies and editing them. Usually those topics also come need different types of images, such as photographs and wikipedia article quotations, for which I’ve tried to follow proper protocol to credit the creators.

Tuning my website and setting up light analytics for it. Now published the site for the first time, but did not share it anywhere so not expecting any visitors or even web crawlers yet.

Uhh, I didn’t post a link to my website anywhere yet but somehow it’s already getting visits. I wanted to do many more improvements but I guess I must now step into the shoes of an artist and face the fact the perfection is out of the window. I’ll just have to keep working on it and people will see whatever I have put out until that moment and nothing more.

In all seriousness though, these visitors are probably totally random people who would not care about my content anyway, but for some reason clicked a few links before quitting.

Working on my website and “published” it for the first time by posting it on lainchan.

Working on my website. A lot. From 11 AM to 4:20 AM with some sleep and fresh air in between. Created lists for all media I’ve consumed and made record of. Then made individual pages to collect my writings, often across several files.

Working on my website more. The amount of stuff to do is endless.

Even though I spent the whole weekend immersed in creating content for the website, the subject of the work was entirely the daily notes about all the media I have have consumed along the years. Editing the text, I had to read it carefully and try remember the works in question. So weirdly it also felt like I was doing an extreme consuming binge. Now I really just want to sleep and forget (though I’m not nearly finished with the work).

Working on my website. I set up a sitemap for use with Google (not sure if I really needed to), and then for good measure thought to do the same for Bing. When I created Bing “Webmaster Tools” account I was offered not only the ability to login with my Google account, but to also import my data from the Google Search Console. To save time, I did and it seems to have worked nicely, took less than a minute to setup the whole thing. I guess now Microsoft sees my Google search data but not the other way around so it’s their “win”. But I need only be considered with my own win.

Still working on my website… I just keep finding stuff to tune. Today worked on getting rid of the duplication of URLs depending on the optional trailing slash, and the “canonicalization” issues arising from that. Also improving page loading times since Google and Firefox have so nice tools to point out the issues that it would be shame to ignore them.

Working on my secondary website at neocities after I finally figured out what I want to do differently: Use humor. My dailies and by extension the main website are a bit dry and pondering, as making jokes to myself doesn’t feel right. But when I actually try to be funny, well I can at least sometimes make people laugh and it sure feels fun to write some jokes.

The original idea with the neocities website was to try make some new connections besides the lainchan webring. I still don’t really feel like opening a social media account and starting to advertise my stuff very directly, but instead would really like to get at least some organic traffic. Another thing I’m trying is uploading more YouTube videos, which is great because those videos make my site better even if no one watches them directly on that platform.

Looking at logs for HTTP access to my website. There’s more bot traffic than I imagined: averaging over a week, about once per minute. Spotted both OpenAI and Claude bots in the log.

I started working on a script to analyze the traffic. About 35% of requests clearly label themselves as bots and another 35% are attacks (doing requests to potentially vulnerable files that might exist on the site). Accesses to the lainchan webring page and its hundreds of images account next 15% of traffic. The remaining 15% is probably a very gross overestimate of legitimate traffic, containing all kinds of bad traffic I didn’t yet manage to filter out (including my own numerous visits).

I have a page counter installed on the website, but I think rather many of my legitimate visitors have “ublock origin” or similar installed. I’m wondering if I could get some insight to those users by this analysis.

There were ~11k total requests during the week that the log covers, so the optimistic 15% would mean ~1.6k legitimate views (including images, CSS files, etc.). The page counter lists 28 visits (actual HTML pages).