Forty-Nine Cents

Whenever this site goes quiet for more than a week, there are two possible explanations. Either I’m lying somewhere slightly drunk, contemplating the larger shape of things. Or something structural is about to change. The first is always true on some level. This time both were.

The new design is called Yuki—a stripped-down remix of the previous two versions, wider, whiter, more minimal. I got rid of the color-coding by category because nobody ever noticed it anyway. The art section had a different color than the travel section, apparently. On a phone screen it was invisible regardless. Gone. Images a bit larger, code cleaner underneath.

The ads went too. They were generating approximately forty-nine cents a month. I want to be precise about that number because it says something true about what personal blogging looks like economically right now—forty-nine cents, despite anti-adblock tricks I was actually somewhat proud of. Not worth it. Also uncomfortable in ways that took me longer than it should have to articulate.

Same with Google Analytics and Jetpack stats. Aggressive browser plugins had already made them unreliable, and there’s something off about tracking your own readers’ behavior in order to produce numbers you’ve mostly stopped trusting. Server-side stats now. Works better than expected. The whole thing loads faster too.

This is what this journal looks like when I stop pretending it’s something other than what it is.