Baking, Blogging, and Webrings: Reflections on 2025
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Christmas has come and gone with its usual mix of stress and relaxation, first rushing to get ready to spend time with family and friends then hopefully enjoying some quiets moments in between. As the years go on for me, a lot more of this preparation seems to involve baking. I'm not sure if it's because I have a sweet tooth or because it's a bit more formulaic, but baking tends to be more fun for me than cooking elaborate meals.
Possibly related, we ended up watching Julie & Julia over the holidays. If you haven't seen the movie, it's a biographical comedy that focuses on two characters: Julie (Powell), who starts a food blog working her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking which was written by the second character, Julia (Child). The narrative draws clear parallels between both characters finding meaning: Julie by cooking and sharing this journey through her blog, and Julia, roughly 50 years earlier, by studying all aspects of French cuisine and imparting this knowledge through her now-classic cookbook.
It was a nice movie and I enjoyed seeing plenty of baked goods that are well above my current skill level. I also appreciated how the movie now feels like a funny little time capsule showing the early days of blogging, with zero mentions of social media or SEO or bots or likes or the dreaded algorithm. Instead, it reflected Julie's experiences communicating into the void and the joy she felt when people actually responded.
In other words, it all felt very human. Its reflections on how we find meaning through the pursuit of goals also made me think of another end-of-year activity..
New Year's Resolutions or reflecting on habits
I'm not a fan of New Year's resolutions for the usual reasons: it's silly to limit decisions to one day a year (which is itself arbitrary) and the pressure that comes from placing so much importance on one list probably won't help anything. Instead, I like to reflect on the past year, considering which emergencies seem far less urgent in hindsight and which habits would be nice to start, stop, or continue. This focus on existing habits builds on the simple idea that what we do today is a pretty good indicator of our future.
A few things come to mind this year. First, I'd like to start finding more time to read for pleasure and making art for relaxation's sake. The former might be a bit harder since there's a lot of overlap with studying, but the latter should be as easy as taking a sketchpad to school. Next, I don't have a lot of hard stops in mind but not spending money that I don't have on pastries that I crave seems like a good place to start.
There are also plenty of things that I want to continue. Doing some exercise every day has been great and I'd like to add some heavier free weights into the mix. I've enjoyed practicing a second language and it would be nice to keep that up, whether Spanish or something else. Having started university, I'd obviously like to keep that up and to keep iterating on study habits so I can take on a bit more without burning out. Finally, I'd like to continue blogging, finding a better balance between writing and optimizing code while also spending a bit more time finding like-minded people.
Writing words or writing code
Unlike Julie, I had no clear goal in mind for this blog beyond self-expression, and while self-expression is a goal in itself, I've still been curious about whether anyone's visiting. I knew going into this that there'd be more impediments to getting traffic than back in the day, but my already-small number of visits have recently fallen off a cliff, prompting me to try and understand the drop in traffic.
A few possibilities came to mind:
- Seasonal traffic - Since we're talking about the holiday season, maybe this is par for the course and I just don't have a point of reference? If that's the case, there's nothing to do but wait, which unfortunately doesn't jibe well with my personality.
- Average search position - I also noticed a drop in average search position but without any corresponding content changes on my side. This might suggest an updated AI preview (totally outside of my control) or a problem with my static site generation?
- Static site generation - This concern belatedly brought me to PageSpeed Insights to help diagnose issues with what I'd built, leading to optimizations around inline CSS and ARIA roles for accessibility, with more changes planned related to
content-visibilityand caching. - Update frequency - The most common advice is that blogs need to be consistently updated. This post marks the fifth published at very irregular intervals over about eight months, so there's plenty of reason to assume that I've made the indexing gods unhappy.
All told, it's most likely that the lack of posts are having a greater impact than the lack of optimization. When the stars align and someone does visit a post, they seem to spend a few minutes reading it. Writing code is always fun and it's nice to get a gold star on some report, but putting effort into speeding things up with so few posts might be like putting "lipstick on a pig" at the county fair when there aren't any attractions to bring people in.. unless the pig itself would be the big draw? I digress..
Maybe my original goal of including tools or interactions in every post was a bit too ambitious. A post without interactivity does feel a bit light, but it takes a good number of hours to make anything engaging without using AI. When I add this to the time spent writing the posts (again, without AI), well, it's proven to be challenging while juggling other priorities. I need to remember that this was meant to be fun and to keep me engaged with my humble tech roots, and possibly to connect me with other folks doing similar things.
Conclusion
So ends the first year-end review! I'm wary of turning this website into a meta-blog, but it still has no specific goal or theme and this post would have been incomplete without talking about blogging at all. Either way, it's all writing practice and a good reminder to keep things moving along even if they're not perfect.
Thinking back to Julie & Julia once last time, I'm curious to see if joining a webring and Bluesky will bring some joy from human connection, or if I should resign myself to the joy of cooking and writing for its own sake. Recent trends suggest this effort is purely for my own benefit and so I'll keep it up as long as it stays meaningful.
On that note, Happy New Year!
Social media and webrings
I'm not entirely sure why I created an account on Instagram in the first place, but it's likely that I'd aspired to creating and posting more images? Either way, it feels like time to try social media again and to that end, I've created an account on Bluesky. At first glance, it feels a bit like Twitter in its early days and I'm hoping is the least toxic option of the easy-to-use social platforms. There are many more people using X and Threads, of course, but I’ve looked and they both just feel like walls of noise. Mastodon is likely to be as good or better in terms of toxicity, but it felt like too much effort just to get started. In spite of its smooth onboarding process, it's also worth noting that Bluesky, unlike Mastodon, does not use ActivityPub although there seems to be a bridge between the two.
Next, maybe due to nostalgia from the movie, I found a big list of webrings and noticed a couple of things:
In the end, I decided to add links to Hotline Webring, primarily because I dig the color and the simplicity to onboard. I'll keep an eye out for similar options in the future..