Title: Making Waves Date: 2023-10-26 Author: zlg My partner's nephew has moved into the house due to events going on with him. With it, my partner and I have moved our computers to another, smaller room, and are somewhat stuck on wifi dongles until I finagle a more acceptable network situation. It's nice that there's room to help everyone, but I'm feeling the pressure of moving out. The housing market is just *so* trash right now; renting is throwing money away. In the interim, I'm still going through physical therapy for my wrists, with plans to find another job after I'm better. It'd be nice to get a job in computers somehow. - - - I've spent some time building a pixel art editor in Javascript, mostly just to see if I could do webapps at all. Now that I'm somewhat familiar, I know *why* I don't like web app development. Designing *pages* and *sites* is still fun, but making something interactive and performant, with a code structure that looks and feels clean? No. Still, there are plans for something bigger in the works, and I think it will be a great résumé piece to prove that I know my way around web dev. I think once that piece is finished, I'll be stepping away from webdev to focus on gamedev since it's more rewarding to me. Some time has been spent looking over the VGStash library code. It needs improvement for the upcoming changes (purchase, beaten, and completion date columns), but it may also be a good time for a refactor. I am soliciting advice for generating accurate visitor analytics for gopher and lighttpd, and the software easiest to use to put together 'reports'. AWStats is an old Perl-powered thing that seems to sorta work, if I orchestrate the right cron stuff. The reason I'm turning to analytics is for one purpose: frustration. Due to an almost total lack of real feedback on what I do, I'm unaware of any audience that I may have, what they're into, what they like to read or see. My domain expires in two years, and I've spent a lot of time on things that nobody that I know in person seems to care about. None of my online friends really care about what I write about or make, either. So, motivation doesn't have to be extrinsic, but let's be realistic: there hasn't been any external reward for pursuing code, at any point in my life, and my ability to generate internal reward is basically dead. This will be an effort to see where the activity is on my website, to help determine if I will continue operating a site come 2025. VPN technology can be run at home and connected to via my phone to do cloud-like syncing without owning a domain name, and there's always FreeDNS or some other dynamic DNS service. I'm not sure I'll have the time or energy to put this together before the end of the year, but I want to open the site up for a year, make an effort to post at least once or twice a month, and then measure things at the end of the year to determine what, if anything is worth writing about in the blog that will be read, or if any of my projects garner any attention. Maybe it's somewhat 'immature' to some, but a little validation can go a long way, I think. It can at least give me empirical data to make my decisions on, when the time comes. Feel free to share any suggestions for simple/easy web analytics software, strategies for homebrewing it if necessary, books on motivation and drive, self organization, etc. It's yours truly AT zlg DOT space. I'm tired of spinning my wheels and going nowhere. It's getting harder to focus on anything or have the mental bandwidth to devote to problem solving, in my hobbies AND personal life. - - - In gaming, I've been doing decent. The 12in12 [1] is already complete for this year, so any games that I beat the rest of the year will be gravy! It feels nice to hit the goal, since I only beat four games last year. - - - That's about it for now. Trying to keep my head up and looking for opportunities to move forward, somehow. We'll see how things go. -z [1]: https://zlg.space/blog/12-in-12-2023-edition.html