anderegg.ca

A look back at 2024, and what's next for 2025

December 31, 2024

At the end of last year, I wrote about wanting to focus on the web in 2024. How did that shake out?

Top level stats

I considered 2023 the first year that I honestly tried getting back into blogging. My goal then was to post something every month, and I managed that with 14 posts in total. This year I wanted to post something at least once a week, and I also met that goal with 79 posts (including this post). Overall I wrote 36,515 words on this site in 2024.

My top five posts by traffic were:

Looking back on blog posts over the year

January was a slower month for me, work-wise, and I was able to spend some time thinking about this site. I wrote a few things, and I’m still quite happy with Just write, you dolt and The library is a superpower, but February was when things really kicked off.

I wrote a piece about a weird quirk of the Can I Use… website where no element (including html) was ever 100% supported. This got a large amount of traffic, and was the top post on Hacker News for a few hours.

The rest of February though April were quieter. I experimented with posting some smaller items, but I couldn’t get that to stick. I’m still happy to have learned about the goofy Katamari Damacy patent images because of a copyright date oddity, as well as some TikTok ban thoughts that I still think hold up.

May was another highlight for this site. I decided to participate in Weblog Posting Month at the last minute, having already posted something the day before. This was a fun experiment and I took away some lessons. I’ll likely give this another go this year, but I’ll give myself more leeway to post smaller things.

June through the beginning of September were light, having somewhat burned myself out on posting in May. I didn’t post anything in August, which I still feel bad about. It was an extremely busy month for me, but I also feel like I fell off the wagon.

Later in September and through October things kicked off again as I covered the still-ongoing WordPress vs. WP Engine drama. Several of the posts in this series got a lot of traffic, with ACF has been hijacked going viral.

I’d been writing about Bluesky since mid-2023, and went from deep skepticism to begrudging support. In November, I wrote about how my feelings changed about the service in Maybe Bluesky has “won”. This turned out to be my biggest post by traffic ever. I also wrote about creating a small toy site to experiment with the Bluesky firehose.

December was fairly low-key with a few small posts as I got some down time during the holidays. I used my iPad to post the last three pieces, which was a surprisingly pleasant experience.

What’s next for 2025?

As I’ve written before, the default publishing flow using Jekyll and GitHub Pages has become a headache. I plan to replatform, and I’m almost certainly going to use Eleventy for that. There are many things I’d like to improve on the site, and I don’t really want to build them on a creaky foundation. I plan to write more about this process as it moves forward.

I also plan to do some incremental design tweaks. I’ve been using the same design since 2012 and have only slightly changed it over time. I don’t think I need a major redesign, but there are some additional things I’d like to add. Primarily, better archive navigation and adding post categories.

I also want to add smaller posts more often, rather than having those thoughts live on someone else’s service first. I’m happy to use Mastodon and Bluesky for socializing and discussion, but I’d rather have links and small posts living on my own site.

Finally, I want to build more small sites and projects. I used to do this a lot more, and I have no idea why I stopped. Building the Bluesky Filter was a fun afternoon project, and I was recently inspired by Robb Knight’s Mean Girls curio. I think I may have over-focused on the blogging part in 2024, and I want to correct that.

Overall, I think this was a successful year in terms of upping my indie-web game. I hope to keep the momentum going next year.