Spring Cleaning

May 21, 2026 ·

Spring cleaning is on today. I have so much stuff I never use and haven't touched in years. It's time for it to go. I also deleted a bunch of things in this website and that's like the digital equivalent of spring cleaning. Most of it is behind the scenes but some visible up front. I deleted view counts and likes yesterday which feels good. I also cleaned up the blog index and gave it a fading out effect so the current and recent blogs appear more focused. I think removing things happens less often than adding things as a general heuristic; there is a moment of hesitation before one lets stuff go. This also applies to concepts, opinions, ideologies and philosophies. A famous meme attributed to Thomas Kuhn is that people die before they change or give into new paradigms. I might be butchering that but I don't want to look it up. But I think it's at least somewhat true in a broad sense even if there's disagreement in the details. I like Thomas Kuhn.

Also, the sparkline on the homepage and my daily newsletter now make me aware of how many words I wrote the day prior. That may turn out to be a bad move in the medium or long run but I'm giving it a shot. The notion that anything that becomes a measurable metric starts to be gamed is also another mostly true idea. We'll see how it goes. I think it's a step in the right direction to count words I write over how many views I get. I also recently developed a much richer and deeper analytical measurement apparatus that lets me know who views this website and how they spend their time here, which is so much better than just a blind view count. I didn't implement a cookie system that violates people's privacy and continues to track them even once they leave; that's none of my business. My implementation of these things is mostly for experimentation sake and to gain insight into next experiments, as fuel.

Anyway, time to go haul stuff and give it away.