Last week I asked whether or not there were any humans actually reading my blog, and since then I have been astonished at the number of emails I’ve received! I thought I might get one or two from people in my immediate social circle, but I’ve heard from folks as far away as Sydney, and from across all walks of life.
I’m still a big believer in email as the best form of communication that humankind has ever invented, and these kind words and interesting exchanges have only bolstered that opinion. Massive, massive thanks to everyone that took time to send me a message, pass along a compliment, or share something from their own lives that are related to things they’ve read about here.
I learned three things from this exercise:
- There are absolutely people out there reading what I write
- The majority of them subscribe via my RSS feed, and most of them seem to have found me either from around the Fediverse, or have followed me since my time working on Vocal, the podcast client I used to maintain
- The timestamps on my posts are super broken, and everything looks like it was published at midnight on the prior evening
That gave me the kick I needed to take a look at my RSS feed generation, as well as some of the metadata tags I use on posts. I believe that the timestamp issue should now be fixed (I’ve subscribed to my own feed via Newsflash so I can see what others see, something I should have done before, and posts seem to be showing up with the correct dates and times now).
As for the other two things I learned, I think the best thing I can do with that information is keep doing what I’m doing, but also make of an effort to encourage feedback and share my posts more often on Mastodon to invite more people in. While I write these posts for myself, knowing they some of them are useful or interesting to others makes the effort seem all the more worthwhile.