Blog status update (July 2024): The blog turns 14
Time for another blog status update post.
The blog turns 14
This month marks the 14th anniversary of my blog’s launch. I wrote about the history of my blog back in 2020 for my 10th anniversary post, so I won’t repeat it here. However, since that post, a few things have changed:
The latter half of 2020 saw me switching from WordPress (and the classic editor-based fork ClassicPress) to Ghost. This lasted until 2021, when I went back to WordPress.
In 2022, I launched a newsletter (via Buttondown). I also formally renamed the media and tech post categories into two semi-separate blogs, “Diverse Tech Geek” (tech posts) and “Diverse Media Notes” (media posts). Those that want to follow my posts by email have that option. Meanwhile, those that go to the actual site won’t have to see posts about (say) Black electrical superheroes and installing Linux Mint mixed together.
2023 saw me shutter my Patreon page in favor of just Ko-fi, as well as a relaunch of my Facebook page. The latter is for the sake of keeping a token presence on one mainstream social network (I use Mastodon and Bluesky much more, but neither is clearly mainstream).
Once again, thanks to everyone for supporting my blog over the years.
A look back at the first half of 2024
As for more recent blog events, looking at my site statistics for the first half of 2024, the most popular posts are “10 major cartoon characters to enter public domain from 2024 to 2034” (media) and “how to block Twitter trolls in bulk” (tech). The latter is in spite of my long having dropped Twitter, and Elon Musk’s changes to the social network probably rendering much of the advice moot.
Again, my advice at this point: stop using Twitter (unless you’re forced to) and use something else. Twitter’s owner is literally upset that there are non-white versions of traditionally white cartoon characters.
The most popular social networks in the first half of 2024 are:
Hacker News (254 visits)
Bluesky (45 visits)
Twitter (44 visits)
Facebook (33 visits)
Reddit (12 visits)
I note that Matomo, the site analytics software I use, doesn’t seem to track traffic from Mastodon (or only as the individual instances’ domains, diluting its numbers). Given that and ignoring the one-off spike from Hacker News (a Slashdot-like site), while Twitter’s still a source of traffic, I assume most of what little social network traffic I get is from Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as Facebook. Which are the main social networks I use and promote my blog with at this point... likely not a coincidence.