Recently: early August
In the style of Tom MacWright.
Company
Done a terrible job keeping up with podcasts lately, so I've been getting less than my normal fix of the Brothers McElroy (& company). Long been a fan of their Monster Factory YouTube series; but they've been remarkably prolific during the lockdown. Most of the videos don't seem written to inform or instruct; they're just little glimpses into other people's lives, little bits of what's going on with them.
It's nice. It feels like company. Which I don't know about you but I haven't had a ton of lately.
I appreciate that people are putting stuff out there for no further objective than company. I sat around for 55 minutes watching Griffin McElroy play Animal Crossing this evening. I appreciate that he keeps the chatter minimal: present but unobtrusive. Never overenthusiastic in the manner of YouTube hypebeasts. My tolerances are all a lot narrower these days.
I'm not much of a video maker, but I hope I can aspire to write enough, and write publically enough, that I can provide some company, in some small way.
Logflare
Trying out Logflare. I'm not particularly interested in putting analytics on my website but I've always been a little bit curious about whether or not anyone actually visits at all. Always sort of assumed that no one does.
But Vercel offers an integration with this Logflare, allowing you to track up to 5.2 million events, which seems like maybe a few more than my website is going to get. And but so since my website is hosted on Vercel, I figured: why not configure this thing and leave it up for a week and see what happens.
First impressions (after like 10 minutes):
The dashboard is sort of tech-brutalist. It's not bad, but it's putting me off a little bit. The header is this electric green like they're going for the hacker look; but buttons are a really generic-looking blue that makes me think it's using some CSS framework behind the scenes. And <input> elements are white, which is very jarring against the black background. Maybe this is a bit shallow of me.
Logs are still hard to read. At least, they're no easier to read when they're part of some SaaS product than when I'm less-ing them from /var/log/nginx. I wish there was some way to just filter out HTTP requests to the application itself (rather than requests for supporting assets). Maybe analytics isn't really the use case here.
Couple of slow requests on the site. A little slower than I'm used to, anyway. I'm used to things being pretty snappy on my website, and I've had one or two requests this evening take around a second, which is unusual. Not sure if it has anything to do with Logflare. To be fair it's a Friday night: so it's not inconcievable that the Internet is just running slowly.