Dave Rupert on blog post hits

Dave Rupert:

Two posts that I thought would be bangers got nearly zero reach. The inverse law of blogging strikes again!

The Surprise Chain is a post I quite literally worked on for over six years, but it got under a thousand hits.

CSS Modules-in-CSS Module Scripts did a little better but I’m not cashing any blogging checks. I thought the formula was good: a cool new CSS feature, a cool CSS trick… but not cool enough I guess.

My current strategy is to not have any stats at all for my personal blog. Zero. None. I have no idea how popular any of my posts are (aside from, perhaps, the number of replies they get). While this strategy leads to me wondering if I’m being linked to (though, webmentions help) I think overall this is better for my mental health.

However, if you must have stats, allow me to remind you that we don’t get to choose what is popular. In that 2015 post I wrote:

But this situation is also a good illustration of the fact that we do not get to choose what is popular. […] We just keep writing or singing or recording, and most importantly, publishing and hoping they resonate. […] My most popular post has had millions of unique page views. Before publishing it I would have never, ever guessed it’d be the most popular post.

The inverse is also true. We sometimes think something should be popular and it simply isn’t.

I’ve written this several times on this blog but – the things I’ve put the most effort in rarely get much attention, the things I publish without much thought often take off.

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