A weekly note

A three shovel week! ☃️

Very slushy last weekend. I only shoveled because it was going to drop below freezing before it all melted.

Very dry and powdery Thursday. And a small bit of clean-up this very brisk 21° Friday morning. I was reminded how much I love the sound of very cold snow crunching under foot.

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A rolled over from front to back for the first and second time this week and has started laughing regularly.

It’s so fantastic.

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I removed analytics from my site this week. The daily view wasn’t really doing anything for me, even if it was kind of fun sometimes.

At some point after writing up my history of tracking people on websites, I switched away from Matomo and started using the Koko Analytics plugin, which stores things directly in the WordPress database. I liked that I could disable cookies entirely and see some basic stats.

But now—who needs it!

I do think parsing server logs every once in a while could be fun to get a list of most frequently visited pages. It is always nice to see what notes I write for myself end up getting quite a bit of traffic.

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Example: I wrote how to read ebooks purchased from Kobo on a Kindle so that I would remember how to do it. It turns out that quite a few people also want to know how to do it.

Because of that EPUB workflow, my Kindle hasn’t been connected to the internet in almost 2 years. 🎉

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I upgraded our Spotify plan from the Duo $12.99/mo to the family $15.99/mo just so I could use a first generation Pixel to play the same track over and over again in the bedroom without us having to juggle that alongside our normal listening.

Worth it.

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Having that same track play over and over again on my account has absolutely destroyed my Discover Weekly playlist. Hopefully it starts to reset soon.

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I ran into wiby the other day and added a link to their surprise me feature in my bookmarks bar. Now I click it a few times a day and am presented with random old looking pages from the internet.

It’s great and how I ran into The Retro WordPress Theme, which is a fun throwback to the 90s.

I’ve also been enjoying Search My Site and Ye Olde Blogroll. My RSS subscriptions are growing at a circa 2006 rate and I’ve been enjoying reading feeds daily as a replacement for trend scrolling in Twitter.

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Lianne La Havas’s Bittersweet has been firmly stuck in my head this week.

It’s popped up on a few of Spotify’s playlists and I always enjoyed it, but something about this week made me listen closer. I ended up enjoying all three of her albums: Is Your Love Big Enough?, Blood, and Lianne La Havas.

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All of my other posts I mentioned last week are still drafts, but this one is published! 🕺