Launching a new site is always a bit of a leap of faith.
No-one owes you their attention, and on an internet glutted with things to do and read and watch and learn, it’s a very reasonable fear that you’ll put all the work in, craft your space with care and attention, and that - for very reasonable reasons - no-one will show up.
I spent four months working on this site - from initial learning about static site generation, through experimentation, creating a theme and, with my wife’s help, populating almost fifteen years of assorted creativity - and during that process I occasionally worried that this might be meaningful to no-one but me.
I think it’s worth taking a moment to examine this impulse: this site is a container for my creative projects, but it’s also a creative project in its own right. It serves a double-purpose as an expression of my design sense but also as infrastructure, and when I consider it as such it re-frames some of my instinctual fears.
If you build a road, its completion may be the end of construction, but the beginning of its functional life. If no-one uses the road in the first day, the first week, maybe they just haven’t worked it into their routines yet, or figured out how it can improve their life.
Ultimately, even if this project ended up being just for me it would have been a success, a online space for me to ground myself in over the next fifteen years and beyond. I feel pride towards what I’ve built, and a sense of foundation that I never did with transient sites on shifting corporate sands.
But my fears were unfounded: I built it, and you all came. That means an awful lot to me, and I’m immensely grateful for all the support I’ve been shown over the past week.
Thank you for all the kind words, all the signal boosts and opportunities to share what I’ve made with you all, and I hope you find more creativity here that resonates with you!
I’ve always had a curious relationship with numbers. I’m not a big mathematician, but give me three large numbers and I’ll give you an order of preference, based on the relationships between the digits and the groupings, and sometimes based on how they feel.
And I’ve always been data-driven, subconsciously attempting to chart an optimal path through problems through statistics and risk analysis. I’d always rather have a quantified measure of something than just a gut feeling.
So it felt somewhat terrifying to launch this site without metrics.
No visit counters, no tracking cookies, no idea of where visitors are coming from or going to. If I want to know what types of posts people want more of, I have to ask them. And in the third age of the internet, this sort of lack of easily-available knowledge is anathema.
I’ll admit to being a little disconcerted mid-week when I wondered how the site was doing, and had to gently remind myself that Not Knowing was by design. I sat in that discomfort for a little while before I came to a realisation: the metrics were never meaningful.
Sure, if you’re a major site beholden to advertisers you need those numbers to support why other companies are giving you money. If you’re owned by corporations and need to prove to their shareholders that you’re worth their investment, metrics are invaluable.
But for me?
I’ve always had visitor metrics on my creative websites, and they never really resolved into anything actionable. Did people come to my site because of specific social media posts, or because it was a slow Tuesday? How many of those visitors were bots or scrapers, drawn by posts unwittingly meeting some algorithmic criteria?
Having those metrics available meant I had to care about them. I had to watch the curve of visitor numbers and try to rationalise them, because maybe, just maybe, I could make them go up again.
Worse, every personal creative site has its quiet periods - usually when you’re actively working on something, and all you need to do is focus on getting it done - and metrics in those downtimes can be actively demoralising.
I’d much rather have space to believe that people are visiting than have quantifiable proof that they aren’t.
For the first few months, at least, I’ll be highlighting a different set of works each week on the front page. There’s a lot of writing and art in the archives that I’m proud of, and I’m delighted to share these pieces with you.
If any of these resonate with you, please share them with others who might enjoy them. I’m fully reliant on word-of-mouth and recommendations from kind folks to spread the word of what I’m doing here, and I’d very much appreciate any help.
This week’s highlights:
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The Distance That Remains [Microfiction] Two titans, destined to meet, stand face to face at last.
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Assorted Textures [Photography] I love a good texture, crisp and clean, like you could just reach out and touch the surface and know exactly what they feel like. Here’s a selection of my favourites.
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Friday Night in the Hostile Environment: Not Tonight and Satire [On Videogames] Not Tonight tries to paint a cautionary tale of immigration, hatred and authoritarianism, through the eyes of a nightclub bouncer. But good satire is hard, and it’s all too easy for fun gameplay systems to lead towards the wrong conclusion.
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Reliquary [Short Fiction] The Shifting House is ritual, rules and grief and atonement, beneath the many eyes of the House Mother. But Malik has seen his share of grief, and brings relics aplenty for the flames.