Elon Musk has been in charge of Twitter for a week. In that time, he has axed nearly 3,500 jobs (50% of its staff) and removed entire teams, such as the vitally important accessibility team.
Many of those that I follow have already announced that they're leaving the platform. Cohost and Mastodon seem to be the most popular destinations and both sites are no doubt doing well from Twitter's current exodus.
Interestingly, those I see leaving aren't just talking about moving to another social platform, they've also said they'll be reinstating or focusing more on their personal sites and blogs, too.
That makes me happy. I believe we should all have our own little corner of the internet. A place to experiment and find our own voice. It doesn't matter if that site is popular or not, the important thing is that it's ours and the content that we put there is 100% our own.
Sites like Twitter will come and go, with some lasting longer than others - I joined Twitter in 2009 and didn't expect to still be using it in 2022! As users, we'll keep hopping to the next big shiny thing each time it emerges. However, our personal sites will always be there, living as long as we want them to.
This week, I reached a new streak milestone on Duolingo: 100 days of Spanish! 🇪🇸
According to my Duolingo profile page, I started using the language learning app in 2017. However, my usage in those first few years can only be described as 'sporadic' at best.
In 2022, I've made more of an effort to make learning Spanish part of my daily routine and try to do at least one lesson a day (usually before I go to bed). Attempting to spend more time using Duolingo, I put the app icon front and centre on my phone's home screen. Whilst that has made a difference, I still struggle to avoid reflexively opening Instagram, TikTok or Twitter each time I unlock my phone.
Frustratingly, I let a 60-odd day streak slip away from me earlier in the year. But, knowing that I've spent at least 160 days learning Spanish this year is a big step toward becoming fluent (however far away that may be).
After 10 days off, which included a bank holiday for the Queen's funeral (that fortuitously extended my time off by another day), it's back to work for me.
Time off always seems to go by quickly, and, whilst this past week was no different, it did feel like a good break. Despite catching a slight cold, I feel rested and ready to go again.
Each morning, when I open the curtains in her bedroom, Ellie says, “The colours are back!”. It's so cute that she thinks the colours go to sleep at night.
A couple of weeks ago I received a cool email from Google saying that for the first time, my site reached 350 clicks from Google Search within 28 days.
That might not seem like a lot to some but my posts are basically notes for myself. So it makes me happy to know that people are finding them because hopefully, it’s helping them out, too.
Now, I don’t necessarily like having analytics on my site. I know that a lot of people refuse to include analytics on their own sites and I respect those that don’t. I just find some of the insights fascinating.
Most searched queries
For example, I had no idea that some of my CSS grid posts were performing so well for the following search queries:
An overview of how visitors find my site on Google.
And check out that average page view duration, too. People aren’t just clicking through to my posts, they’re also reading them too. That makes me happy.
Takeaways
Posting stuff online is daunting. So many of my posts never see the light of day because there's always that nagging thought that someone more knowledgeable than me has already written about this.
Whilst I’m not going to suddenly start reviewing my site analytics every day, seeing that some of my posts are performing well has been a great positive feedback loop for me.
I know that I need to post more and this is encouraging me to do so. I have a huge backlog of saved articles and tweets that I want to post about, so I best get crackin’.
One often overlooked benefit of using the `ch` unit to apply a max-width to type is regardless of the font-size, it can help you create predictable breaks, which is super useful for massive headings etc pic.twitter.com/dMT7SeW0YG
As a huge fan of the Chris Sawyer Transport Tycoon games, I added Sweet Transit to my Steam wishlist as soon as I watched the trailer. Coming sometime in 2022, this strategic city building game from Team17 is no doubt gonna be a massive time sink for me.
No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.