April is here. I’ve got to admit that I haven’t been super productive on the side projects in the last couple weeks. My parents were in town at the end of March, a few new proper work projects have sprung up and I’ve been spending a few free hours here and there playing Fallout 4. Other than some tinkering with Swift, there’s not much progress on the active projects.
I do have a few things that I would like to finish in the next two months though. The first three weeks of June are going to be very busy so I’d like to finish up a few things before then so I don’t have to take a three week break and come back to a project I don’t remember anything about. Maybe Deep Birding ?
I’ve been having a hard time getting started on machine learning stuff. There are plenty of tools but they’ve all heavily optimized for seeing the quantitative efficiency of the results for testing and research, not for visualizing or adapting the results for use in a project. I have to do a lot more reading before I can get up and running with it.
As for current projects, That Thing in Swift continues to have its best-month-ever every month. I wrote about some clever ways to adjust the organization of view controllers in Kill your viewDidLoad on the 16th of March and finally posted to Reddit on the 21st which sent huge amounts of traffic and links from various other places. The long tail of Twitter links continues into this week. I finished the custom page preview images the week after that post launched so now all those links have nice images.
It remains to be seen if the many links given in the last couple weeks translate to more search traffic (by far the dominant means to reach the site). I don’t know how long that might take or when those values are recalculated or even what search terms it might impact.
I killed the discourse integration and server. That was not a good substitute for comments. I’m not certain a normal comment system would be useful or drive any sort of additional traffic. I was thinking about in-page annotations/comments but I don’t like the options that I looked at. I would have to build my own to make it really fit with the content and that seems like a lot of effort for little benefit.