I’ve been playing around with Metabase to view a few stats about my website.

frequency and spikes

It was fun to look at the frequency of my posts over time – you see quite a prominent spike around March and April 2017, and then there’s a slowish decline in frequency until around August/September 2018.

Looking at my posts from those dates, I picked out two ones which I think explain both spikes in a fun way, and also show a few indieweb projects I want to give a big shout out to, indebted to them as I am for my current indieweb activity.

spike 1: indieweb wordpress

Hello World(Press)

March 2017 was when I first started porting my site to WordPress.  Prior to that I had been using Hexo (a node based static-site generator) and prior to that Octopress (an extension of Jekyll, another static-site generator).  I wasn’t really posting notes with either, just the occasional longer form traditional blog post.  My first Homebrew Website Club was some time in 2016, and it took me a while to settle on a platform.  I went with WordPress in the end because I needed to familiarise myself with it for a new job I was starting, and it also seemed like a good way to get an indieweb kickstart.  (I’ve just realised that I’ve never imported my pre-Wordpress posts into WordPress yet!  Something I’ll do over the holidays.)

The kickstart was definitely true – you get so much out of the box with WordPress for indieweb.  Not sure if I’d be where I am along my journey without it.  So – two big shout outs to the IndieWeb WordPress plugins and all the people that maintain them, and to the SemPress theme, both of which gave me a big kickstart into the IndieWeb.

spike 2: indigenous and aperture

Mobile posting ahoy!

So the second spike is September this year.  And that can definitely be attributed to me finding out about Indigenous for Android.  That allows me to post to my site from my mobile.  (WordPress has its own mobile client, but I can’t do all the indieweb stuff that I want to do from it.)  So there’s a big spike where I started posting notes and photos while I was out and about.

The other recent development which is increasing my indieweb activity is indie reading via a combo of microsub with aperture and Indigenous .  I’ve started subscribing to various feeds – some of which are just plain old RSS feeds, and some which are microformats h-feeds of friends on the indieweb.  I read them in Indigenous, and like, reply, and bookmark all from Indigenous too.

thanks

So a big thanks to everyone involved in all of these tools, and the indieweb in general!  For the projects I’ve mentioned, I think the most recent shoutouts probably go to GWG, pfefferle, swentel, and aaronpk – but all of these tools are built on the work of many others too, so I encourage you to check them out and find out more.

Two spikes in my posting history

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