Getting Rid of Visitors
| 3 min read
I finally did it. I removed that one post that single-handedly accounts for more than half of all of the traffic on my blog.
You see, this started out as a simple "How To" to document running one of my favorite games on Linux, one that is notoriously finicky, even on Windows and I kept forgetting how to do it again.
That was in December 2021. Fast forward to now and it's become the most comprehensive piece of documentation on the subject (which, granted, is very niche) out there with a word count of more than 50,000, not including a few thousand lines of code snippets and automation scripts.
And while I still think this is worth doing, I recently noticed that the Pureblog (see here, if you're interested in reading about my migration there) online post editor slowed down to a crawl when I edited this post. Also, I had to do quite a bit of noodling around with PHP, JS and CSS to implement a few features that this little CMS is just not meant for. And it was then that I realized that I was maintaining a whole wiki disguised as a blog post. Not sure why it took so long but there you have it.
And so I got to work on restructuring everything. First I tried simply setting up this one post as a single-page website but then I realized that there are better ways to structure all this information and make it more accessible and digestible. I looked into several static site generators and themes for them until I stumbled on mdbook. This is the piece of software that is responsible for rendering The Rust Book (which I've actually read so it was familiar) and it turns out that it's an extremely good fit for almost all of my needs! It has theming, templating, syntax highlighting, simple overrides, editable (!) code blocks, a nice way of structuring the content in chapters and displaying an overview, built-in search (a pretty good one too), even file includes.
What's probably even better is what it doesn't have: complete freedom to change everything about everything which usually just entices me to dig deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole until I forget what I actually came here to do.
I worked on it a lot over the past couple of days and can now proudly present:
Yes, I bought a domain for this, why do you ask? All requests to the old blog post are now redirected here which means, my blog will see a lot less traffic but that only means that the people who turn up there actually want to read my writing, amirite? No? Just bots then? Oh well. I do what I can to get rid of those but that's a topic for another time.
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