Some history

You may or may not know that I recently ran a very scientific poll to see if I could discern where people read my blog, hence deciding where to put my energy into a notification stream. The notification that the poll had ended popped up in my feed a few moments ago, so I remembered to look and summarize them.

You can see the original poll and results in the fediverse post here should you so desire - don’t worry too much about clicking out, because I’m going to write them all here with comments anyway.

The results

I was pleasantly surprised at the results - 30 people took the time to respond, which is about 29 people more than I expected, so for that I thank you very much!

RSS - 13 votes (43%)

To be totally honest, I didn’t even realize that my site was publishing an RSS feed until a week or so ago; apparently Hugo (the static site generator that I use) does this by default, so that feels like an easy win. I can’t say that I’m shocked by RSS leading the pack; it’s been around for quite some time, is a mature protocol, and the circles that I expect to read my ramblings would go to aggregation first. Seems to make sense, and I already have that set up to notify people - sweet!

Fediverse - 8 votes (27%)

Also not horribly surprising, since my Fediverse account is currently the only place I actively announce new things. I’ll continue to do so, and probably set up something like Hatsu to enable the ability to follow an ActivityPub feed.

I stumble upon it sometimes - 4 votes (13%)

This intrigues me to absolutely no end - if you randomly remember/find/trip over this page, I’d love to know how you get here. The concept of indie web / web rings / wandering the internet has always amazed me - probably because that’s what the internet truly was when I was first coming through it. Word of mouth BBS access, IRC accounts, geocities, and home.net/~user pages were the way information traveled before algorithms killed the wonder…

Browser Bookmark - 2 votes (7%)

This also fascinates me, mostly because to me knowing someone bookmarked a page feels like assigning intent and value to the action - “Oh, this interests me enough that I am going to spend a few moments every few days to see if anything new has come about.”

I don’t care, just show me the results - 3 votes (10%)

I love it - pure honesty, and probably the answer that I would have chosen for someone else’s poll.

Pen pals

I still firmly believe that blog-style writing should be a conversation-type piece - so if you’re up to it, reply to anything (or EVERYTHING!) I’ve written with a post of your own, or shoot a message to any of the places on find me. I’m not always great at answering mail (especially in short form microblogging style), but I try and it’s always good fun - especially when long form correspondence can go back and forth.