Electron Adventures 100-post series is finished

The Electron Adventures series I've been writing is now over.

The series is available on two platforms, with the same content:

• dev.to
• hashnode

If you want to read the conclusions, episode 99 (dev.to, hashnode) summarizes the technical aspects of the series, and episode 100 (dev.to, hashnode) talks about what it was like to do daily blogging. As it's already all there, I won't be repeating it here.

Or start from the first, or just check whichever episodes look interesting. Some subjects continue over a bunch of episodes, but there's plenty of fresh starts on the way, so you definitely don't need to read it 1 to 100.

I plan to do some more similar series in the future, they'll definitely be announced here, and for now I plan to double-post any such content to dev.to and hashnode, so feel free to follow me on whichever one's more convenient.

It's also possible that I might do a few bonus episodes beyond the 100 someday, as there's a few subjects I couldn't cover for various reasons.

Electron Adventures 50 episodes so far

Two months ago I got an idea of starting a small Electron coding project. And lacking any kind of moderation, I decided to just post daily coding episodes for like a 100 days. I'm halfway there.

There were definitely some technical issues early on, but I got that out of the way.

Since then I blogged at a rate of about 1 post a day - either creating or updating a small Electron program, and then doing a short writeup about it, with code samples and discussion of issues encountered along the way.

When I started, I had a vague idea of where I wanted to head:

• I wanted to try out new code blogging platforms.
• I wanted to collaborate with people. It's something I used to do a lot before the pandemic, but had too few opportunities since.
• I wanted to figure out how I can code Electron in something that's not Javascript - Ruby, Python, basically anything whatsoever. Either purely non-JS, or in some kind of hybrid mode (JS frontend, non-JS backend). All other languages desperately need a good UI system, and I thought this might be worth investigating.
• I wanted to be able to create Windows UIs for my Total War modding tools (and potentially Paradox modding tools too). I did them before with JRuby + Java-based toolkits, but none of that works very well.
• mc more or less broke after software upgrade, and it freezes if I do anything funny, so I wanted to investigate how I can make my own Orthodox File Manager in Electron
• and I might get some Electron and Svelte practice, as I don't use them too often

So far the adventure led me mostly somewhere else:

• I did a few coding sessions with Amanda Cavallaro, but it's actually quite difficult to get someone to join such a big ongoing project for just an episode or two.
• I started coding a file manager. Blogging about every tiny commit is fun, but it takes much longer to blog than to code, so I doubt I'll get even MVP this way.
• I did some coding with Javascript frameworks I don't normally use like Vue or Marko; but zero with non-JS languages so far
• I didn't even try to connect anything with my Total War modding tools
• I definitely got that Electron and Svelte coding practice.

This is fine.

The series is available on two platforms, with the same content:

• dev.to
• hashnode

Each post has about 71 views total (60 views on dev.to and 11 views on hashnode).

Those numbers feel very low to me, as back in the good days a typical post on my blog would get thousands of views, occasionally tens of thousands. My most read post had 170k views.

I also don't know how many views new vs old posts get, so if people would read that for years and it would add up, or if they'd just fade away being barely searchable.

I'm also not sure how much value this series even has to the readers. A 100 post series is not something people really do, ever. Am I expecting people to read from start to finish? To pick it halfway? To just read random a post or two?

A number of the posts are reasonably self-contained, but especially the ones about building the file manager sort of assume some familiarity with existing code. I also didn't really make it obvious which episodes are self-contained and which aren't.

The codebase with each episode's code also has very little interest so far, at 2 stars and zero-activity 3 forks.

I'd probably still be coding something like this anyway, but the main point of writing is having some readers, so if people aren't very interested in this kind of content, I guess I could stop, or do something different.

I'll continue for the rest of the 100 episodes and then write another post about the whole experience.

Oh and I was contacted by multiple different people, who wanted me to write various educational content. Unfortunately I don't really have time for that.

My adventures with dev.to and hashnode so far

As I said in my previous post, I was looking for a new blogging platform.

I created accounts on dev.to and on hashnode, and started my new Electron Adventures series.

Here's hashnode version:

• Electron Adventures: Episode 1: Creating New Electron App
• Electron Adventures: Episode 2: Frontend Code and Backend Code
• Electron Adventures: Episode 3: What Can Backend Code Even Do?
• Electron Adventures: Episode 4: Image Gallery with Dynamic HTML

And here's dev.to:

• Electron Adventures: Episode 1: Creating New Electron App
• Electron Adventures: Episode 2: Frontend Code and Backend Code
• Electron Adventures: Episode 3: What Can Backend Code Even Do?

What went wrong with dev.to

dev.to was a huge disappointment. I tried to post episode 4, and it just outright refused to accept it, or even preview with "invalid markdown detected" error.

It wouldn't even give me a hint where was that "invalid markdown", so I had to delete parts of the posts, until I got it down to a single line, then simplified a bit:

Yeah, any code block with date: in it just crashes their engine. I tried to throw some backslashes in various places, but that didn't fix it.

I could maybe change code to say "da" + "te:", but that's really stupid for a code blogging platform.

Unless this gets fixed, I really don't see myself using it, especially as I like doing much weirder things with code than printing some URLs.

I'm not sure if there's any place where I can report the bugs where they'd actually read them and maybe fix that (for what it's worth, I tweeted at them).

What went wrong with hashnode

Hashnode let me post everything all right, but there's another problem. There doesn't seem to be any place where people can see all my blog posts. If I'm not logged in, my profile page looks like this:

Like, where the hell is my blog?

I suspect that maybe I need to go through the whole "setup your blog" process to get such page, but this really wasn't clear when I started. I thought by posting blogposts I'd already have some kind of blog created, but maybe that's not how it works?

What's next

I'll try to see if hashnode is fixable, and if dev.to actually responds to this bug.

I still have an option of using external markdown converter and posting here, even though it's a messy process. I'm not sure which other blogging platforms I can try.

I want to continue Electron Adventures, but I might take a short break to resolve these technical problems first.

Looking for a new blog

I've had this blog here since 2006. I don't plan to delete it or anything, but it's not really a platform I'd recommend to anyone.

It's especially bad for talking about any tech issues - there's no support for code at all.

So I've been writing posts offline as Markdown offline, using Markdown to HTML converter, and just dumping the result here. The only extra step was manually finding a cat picture for the post. If I then notice any kind of corrections I'd like to do, they are quite awkward to make.

I've been not very happy about it, but in the past, this blog used to have a lot of readers, and moving to another platform would lose most of that engagement.

Well that's gone now - blogging is maybe a 10% as popular as it was in its Golden Age, and RSS is nearly dead - the few people who read blogs now either get there from Google, or from someone linking to specific post on social media. Either way, the cost of switching is much lower.

And timing is really good now. I have an idea for a new post series, with tons of code.

After checking a bunch of planforms, I created accounts on:

• taw on hashnode
• taw on dev.to

My plan right now is to post same content on both at least for a while to see which one I like better.

I'll probably keep posting on-coding stuff, and various announcement posts (usually of the "look at this cool software I wrote" type) here.

Some other content creation platforms I used, or still use:

• gaming blog - I mod most games I play, so I write down notes as go, so I got an idea of maybe turning those notes into some kind of AAR; these are probably not the most fascinating AARs unless you also mod stuff; unfortunately Google deleted most of old screenshots there when Google+ died, so most of old posts have text only
• youtube channel - I was posting gaming content there for a few years, I haven't done that in 3 years, but I keep thinking about resuming that
• Google+ - well, that died, still miss it
• twitter - I keep posting there out of habit, but really twitter is a sad shadow of its former lively self, and I keep thinking about just dropping that
• twitch - I tried streaming there for a bit, but I never really got into this, as I don't watch live streams myself, I only watch gaming content on my own time, at 200% speed

I'm moving back from Google+ to Blogger

As you might have noticed, this blog hasn't been very active recently. I never went offline, I was just using Google+ as microblogging platform.

Unfortunately the truth is - Google+ sucks as microblogging platform. Old posts are unsearchable and get pretty much lost as soon as they drop off the front page, there's no way to put any formatting there, and there are a lot fewer people on Google+ than people on the wide Internet who can stumble upon this blog.

And then the Pinterest+ redesign was the last straw.

I'm not quitting Google+ - it's still OKish for random link sharing and a few other thing - not great, but I don't know what would be better (the once great delicious got pretty much killed by Yahoo). My current plan is to use this blog more (and mostly write shorter posts than in the past) and use Google+ less.

In case you're interested, here are my Google+ posts. There's a lot of good stuff there, even if it's hard to search.

Technical Update

A quite technical update for the blog.

PostRank plugin I used to display most popular posts got bought by Google and shut down. Fortunately Blogger now has some kind of popular posts functionality, so I added that instead. I'm not terribly enthusiastic about styling.

Social sharing buttons I had were pretty dubious (including digg, anybody remembers that?). I added Blogger's standard buttons while keeping custom code for reddit, delicious, and Hacker News. If there's anything important I forgot (pinterest?) let me know.

And since Blogger's spam filters are absolutely awful I had to enable captchas. It was either that or require Google/OpenID account, and captchas are probably less annoying to most people. I'd prefer if there were some less drastic options, or even better if spam filters actually worked, but I don't really have much choice here.

By the way, while this blog doesn't have terribly much going on, I am very active on Google+, soup.io, and depending on my mood on Twitter. If you're interested, follow me there.

How to create value by blogging

I'm hardly blogging these days, so I though I'd at least open a Twitter account - and here it is, and some stuff I've done recently like London Barcamp 4 and getting OLPC XO-1 laptop weren't blogged at all, just twitted. This is all caused by a certain problem with blogging - people really like to read long blog posts. Just look at the "Popular posts" sidebar - it's long post after another. People even like insanely long blog posts like those by Steve Yegge. But long posts take too much time and energy, so most of the posts written by me and other bloggers are pretty short. So I somehow thought that writing stort blog posts isn't really worthwhile, and tweeted instead.

Today I thought maybe it's time to verify it, so for some hard data I collected statistics from Google Analytics (unique page views) and del.icio.us (number of bookmarks except of mine), and divided my 202 blog posts into ten buckets depending on their plain text size.

And indeed - it seems that almost nobody cares about the short blog posts and the longer the post is the more people read it. The difference is even more pronounced when counting del.icio.us bookmarks. I feel that the number of del.icio.us bookmarks is a much better indicator of post's "value" than page views, as page view is generated before the reader even seen the post, while bookmark is generated only after it was read and decided to be valuable. Search good vs experience good.

Bucket	Posts	Average size	Average page views	Average bookmarks	Average page views per kB	Average bookmarks per kB
1	20	16742	1776	20.0	126	1.4
2	20	6890	1513	11.0	224	1.6
3	21	4590	1036	4.9	245	1.1
4	20	3456	496	3.8	149	1.1
5	20	2803	314	2.3	114	0.9
6	20	2129	301	1.1	146	0.5
7	20	1656	402	1.9	238	1.1
8	21	1188	223	0.2	177	0.2
9	20	789	276	1.2	399	1.7
10	20	421	143	0.2	384	0.5

This confirms my beliefs and disproves the commonly held ADHD theory of blog readers which states that most blog readers have very short attention spans and would much rather look at the kittens. It seems that to the contrary, reader really love long posts. At least my readers. You'll still be getting kittens of course, my blog would look quite empty without them.

On the other hand a completely different picture arises when page views per kB and bookmarks per kB are measured. Bookmarks per kB is pretty flat, while page views per kB is going down fast. So if kBs of text are a good measure of blogger's effort then the best way of generating value is writing tons of stort posts.

I'm so undecided. Is it better to write fewer long posts, many of which would be big hits (relative to the blog popularity of course, this isn't I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER), or rather many posts which would generate less value per post but more value overall. I'm kinda writing for myself, but I still think if the post would be valuable to the average reader or not before posting it. I should probably simply keep posting instead of thinking too much.

Who reads my blog - Redditers and Googlers

More than a year ago when I started this blog and I had no idea that anybody would actually read it, but it seems to be doing quite well. According to Google Analytics over the year there were over 90 thousand page views by over 50 thousand visitors. Recently there are about 420 page views daily, or one every three and half minutes. I don't think I have that many friends are relatives, so who reads my blog ?

There seem to be two distinct populations - Redditers, and Googlers. Excluding "direct traffic", which simply means that for whatever reason referrer was not recorder, 35% of visitors come from Google, and 32% from Reddit. The next three sources DZone, Daring Fireball and del.icio.us provide only 6.6%, 3.4% and 1.7% of visits, respectively.

The full story of article's readership look something like that:

• Article is published. I submit it to del.icio.us and usually also to reddit
• If Redditers like the article it gets to the main page. I have absolutely no idea which articles Redditers will like and which they won't. Actually I less than no idea - things I consider very interesting almost invariably get downvoted, while random rants I wrote when angry or bored get tens of points. So I submit pretty much everything programming-related and let them decide. My karma from doing so is highly positive, so it's probably not considered a very abusive practice
  
• In the next day or two it gets a lot of views from Redditers
  
• People submit it to other reddit-like websites, or write answers to it, and it stays popular for a few more days
• There's a sudden drop in popularity, as people move on to other things
  
• Google indexes the article, and a steady flow of Google visits starts. The flow is not wide, but it seems to last pretty much indefinitely
  

To get some numbers I scrapped Google Analytics reports - Google Analytics has no real API, and it became even more difficult to use programmatically after the update, but I somehow managed to extract the information I want (Google Analytics cookie extracted using Firebug).

require 'time'

$cookie = File.read("/home/taw/ga_cookie").chomp

def wget(url, fn)
  system 'wget', '--header', $cookie, url, '-O', fn unless File.exists?(fn)
  File.read(fn)
end

def each_day(first_day)
  day = Time.now.gmtime
  day_number = 0
  while true
    day_s = day.strftime('%Y%m%d')
    break if day_s < first_day
    yield day_s, day_number
    day_number += 1
    day -= 24*60*60
  end
end

def get_data_for(day)
  url = "https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/export?fmt=3&id=1222880&pdr=#{day}-#{day}&cmp=average&rpt=TopContentReport&trows=500"
  fn = "results-#{day}"
  res = wget(url, fn)
  header_finished = false
  res.each{|line|
    unless header_finished
      header_finished = true if line =~ /\AURL\tPage Views\tUnique Page Views\t/
      next
    end
    url, page_views, unique_page_views, = line.split(/\t/)
    next unless page_views # Skip the final line
    next unless url =~ %r[\A/\d{4}/\d{2}/]
    next if url =~ /\?/
    yield(url, page_views.to_i)
  }
end

$stats = {}

each_day('20060923') {|date, day_number|
  get_data_for(date){|url, page_views|
    $stats[url] ||= []
    $stats[url][day_number] = page_views
  }
}

$stats_by_post_age = []

$stats.each{|url, stats|
  stats.reverse.each_with_index{|page_views, age|
    page_views ||= 0
    $stats_by_post_age[age] ||= 0
    $stats_by_post_age[age] += page_views
  }
}

total_page_views = $stats_by_post_age.inject{|a,b| a+b}
p $stats_by_post_age.map{|x| 0.01 * (10000 * x.to_f/total_page_views).to_i}

And the not very surprising results:

• 22.26% of page views are in the day article is published. As the article could have been published on any time of the day (just after midnight to just before midnight), on average that's article's first 12 hours.
  
• It falls rapidly to 11.47% and 4.28% over the next two days
• In the following ten days the numbers are 2.03%, 1.82%, 1.46%, 1.49%, 1.25%, 0.99%, 0.86%, 0.72%, 0.95%, 0.81%. By that time more than half visits occurred.
  
• In the following weeks the number gradually decreases, but I think it's more due to many posts not being online long enough than due to actual popularity loss. Maybe I'll run some statistics to test this hypothesis some day.
  

You should be able to adapt this script to your blog if you want to know how the numbers looks for your blog.