This is cool. I am a total hypocrite; I say I blog for the love of it and being a slave to analytics is terrible but in reality I love the sense of immediate feedback when I see a bunch of hits on a project I spent hours on.
I did end up implementing a simple hit counter on my site just to satisfy my craven need for validation without resorting to full analytics. It doesn't beep at me, but maybe it should.
I picture this like the classic Garfield comic where Jon just stares in increasing frustration at his rotary phone for multiple panels, to finally shout JUST RING ALREADY.
(His cat adds some dry remark which I have forgotten)
This is what I did as well. Not wanting to take away my users privacy I built my own simple counter in 2022. I wrote about The Raspberry Pi 400 in My Bedroom on my blog at the URL below.
I just downloaded a click sound and I think I'm going to see if adding it drives me crazy.
Good question, it is not bad to enjoy attention for a project you worked on.
But I feel that, if unchecked, that same impulse can lead to deliberately doing projects specifically for validation which leads to low quality click-bait and vapid self-promotion. I think a healthy indifference for the public at large is a good thing.
That is one of the reasons I got rid of detailed, real-time analytics in favor of a simple hit counter (the other is privacy). If I really stuck to my principles I wouldn't even do that but I am a hypocrite.
When I was hosting a site run on bespoke PHP pages, I had a hit counter that used straight text files under the hood. It was surprisingly effective and a fun experience.
Just goes to show that even the most obscure comments can net thousands of views, considering only a small percent of people that have read the comment will actually engage, and that small percent was over 4k folks. Kind of puts things in perspective for me.
The Fish Doorbell would be a great use case for AI, but I'd rather live in a world where volunteers just watch the video and ring a bell whenever a fish wants to get through.
The point of the fish doorbell is educating people about what lives in the water. There would be much less resource-intensive ways of "solving" the problem, if that was the goal.
Fun. You can tell it's receiving some love right now
while true; do; sleep 5; curl http://susam.net:8000 ; done
curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed
curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed
curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 11 ms: Couldn't connect to server
curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection reset by peer
curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 8 ms: Couldn't connect to server
curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed
curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 8 ms: Couldn't connect to server
curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed
curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 10 ms: Couldn't connect to server
curl: (7) Failed to connect to susam.net port 8000 after 11 ms: Couldn't connect to server
curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection reset by peer
curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection reset by peer
curl: (1) Received HTTP/0.9 when not allowed
You might want to add the --http0.9 flag to curl, to tell it that getting a response of just "ok" (HTTP 0.9 style, body only without headers) isn't an error.
Here's a more advanced - and 'ancient' (2000) - version of this idea: Peep (The Network Auralizer): Monitoring Your Network With Sound [1].
I ran this for a number of months back in the day, it made my living room sound like a jungle. Running the same setup nowadays would probably make it sound like the gates of hell given the increase in network traffic.
You can still find it at Sourceforge but it will need some work or maybe a VM running an older Linux distribution:
Sometime circa 1998 there was a group looking for new technical hires for startups they invested in. They posted somewhere, perhaps /., that they were accepting résumés via SMTP on a non-standard port, as a filter mechanism.
I never heard back, although I ended up working for one of their companies the next year anyway.
Around the same time people sometimes posted job openings in the html source of their websites. I never answered any, 'cause I wasn't looking for technical jobs at the time, but it always seemed clever to me.
Any, and only, nerds who were interested in web development incessantly "View Source"ed on every page that looked interesting. It was a major vector by which early-web frontend techniques spread themselves, and it was great: you could cut-and-paste the html, direct download the .css and other resources, and get an offline model of their site running for you to tinker with to learn their secrets. All the magic was out in the open (for those who cared to pull back the curtain), and the future seemed limitless.
Readit News
I did end up implementing a simple hit counter on my site just to satisfy my craven need for validation without resorting to full analytics. It doesn't beep at me, but maybe it should.
(His cat adds some dry remark which I have forgotten)
I just downloaded a click sound and I think I'm going to see if adding it drives me crazy.
https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-pi-4...
I really hate that modern websites include multiple trackers - there is really no need for invasive analytics.
But I feel that, if unchecked, that same impulse can lead to deliberately doing projects specifically for validation which leads to low quality click-bait and vapid self-promotion. I think a healthy indifference for the public at large is a good thing.
That is one of the reasons I got rid of detailed, real-time analytics in favor of a simple hit counter (the other is privacy). If I really stuck to my principles I wouldn't even do that but I am a hypocrite.
Talking about that, I have a great blog that…
Just kidding
https://visdeurbel.nl/en/
The best kind of experiments. And sometimes huge innovations/inventions/medicine/progress/more fun will arise from it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts
I ran this for a number of months back in the day, it made my living room sound like a jungle. Running the same setup nowadays would probably make it sound like the gates of hell given the increase in network traffic.
You can still find it at Sourceforge but it will need some work or maybe a VM running an older Linux distribution:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/peep/
[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...
I never heard back, although I ended up working for one of their companies the next year anyway.
Any, and only, nerds who were interested in web development incessantly "View Source"ed on every page that looked interesting. It was a major vector by which early-web frontend techniques spread themselves, and it was great: you could cut-and-paste the html, direct download the .css and other resources, and get an offline model of their site running for you to tinker with to learn their secrets. All the magic was out in the open (for those who cared to pull back the curtain), and the future seemed limitless.