---
title: Unmeasured
categories:
- meta
content-tags:
- analytics
---

<span class="marginnote"><img src="/media/2019-11/rat-mic.png"></span>
When I migrated this site to [Wordpress in 2006](/2006/04/09/wordpress-it-is.html) I also enabled Google Analytics to track who was linking to me and which pages were popular.

13 years later, it's time to accept that I don't actually care. As long as I keep [URLs consistent](https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html) incoming links are safe. In the early twenty-aughts I cared about the popularity of my "content" but social media formalized that attention-seeking and gradually killed my interest in it.

Today, I would prefer to not know who is visiting this site. I'm aware my "audience" is small in any venue, and a personal web site is hardly a major media outlet. I no longer  expect even friends and family will read anything here unless it is also cross-posted to some social netework. This encourages me to focus on posting here for my own benefit.

So I have removed Google Analytics and a not replacing it. The only way I will notice traffic to this site as currently configured is if Netlify informs me I'm over their 100GB monthly bandwidth quota.

In case I regret this in the future, though, here were the "top performing" posts to this point:

- [Pointing at the TV](/2010/08/29/pointing-at-tv.html) saw over 10k visitors the day it was [fireballed](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/08/31/gerwitz)
- [Premature optimization is the root of all evil](/2004/08/12/premature-optimization-is-the-root-of-all-evil.html) gets a steady stream from [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_optimization)
- [Om Asatoma Sadgamaya (ॐ असतो मा सद्गमय)](/2003/11/15/om-asatoma-sadgamaya.html), based on when I had comments here, is found by many looking for the Pavamana Mantra.
- [Piggers are number one](/2010/09/10/piggers-are-number-one.html) also gets a lot of search traffic
- [Bus Driver Appreciation Day](/2009/02/23/bus-driver-appreciation-day.html) is linked from a few places as the origin of [TDAD](http://transitdriverday.org/)
