Dev Notes 15: Brief Notes on Updating IMDb Post and Blog Features
By David Gros. . Version 0.1.0 Dev Notes (DN) documents progress towards some larger article. Discussion is preliminary. Today's are somewhat journally. It documents some partial progress on yesterday's draft of movie distribution analysis, and talks about other blog progress. Yesterday I made a v0.1 of the article covering analysis of the distribution of IMDb rating distributions. I am conflicted about the style of that post. The post was originally motivated by the exploration of the 9-gap, but it quickly grew in scope to other kinds of distributions, as well as building out some statistical modeling of the distributions. This led to only being able to post a partially written version yesterday. I'm now leaning to a multipart article (cheekily called a "trilogy" to adapt movie language). I haven't done this before, but I think it would be good to try out. I'm also starting to update the style. I want to lean into the film theme, and write the post a bit more like a whodunnit mystery. Then each part can follow a slightly different film genre style. Unfortunately, I only spent an hour or two on this, so didn't quite reach completion. In theory I should focus more on how I distribute posts on the blog. My previous posts on reddit have been fairly successful, but good blogs build out their own distribution. RSS is a classic way blogs were distributed since the 90s. It's a basic format that just lists the post. I went ahead and made an RSS (at dactile.net/rss.xml) feed for the site. Currently the site has a somewhat confusing architecture. The individual posts are atomic folders with a build system based on Python (with a bit of help from Node for processing mdx files). Each post also contains a config file with different metadata in its own directory. However, the homepage is in Astro. There's no clear reason for this, other than that when I was exploring setting up the blog, I played around with Astro. I didn't end up using it for the posts, as I wanted full flexibility on the tech stack of each post, but the homepage stuck around. This now takes a bit of engineering to then make the RSS feed. I went with a system where I symlink to all the config files, and then a script autogenerates the RSS from those linked configs. I did a bit of research on making a newsletter for the site. I'm fairly conflicted on this. Personally, I don't want random articles in my inbox, and pretty much never sign up for these. I also find the random "sign up for my newsletter" interstitials to be very annoying. And yet, things like substack are very popular, so clearly some people don't mind the newsletters. I should debately make a substack mirror of the site, but also I enjoy being able to take advantage of the kinds of visuals and layouts that the web enables, without trying to fit everything into being just another substack or having to maintain two versions. A matter of future debate, I suppose. There are a few other options for newsletters. Things like Buttondown seemed promising, but it is very expensive. It becomes 29 a month. It should not cost over $300 a year to send emails (whether I send any or not). An open-source self-hosted option like Listmonk seems like a leading candidate, but still future work. Today's notes are somewhat metajorunal-ly. I hope to push the updates to the rating article soon, and then will have the three parts of that to share.Updates on 9-Gap Post
Notes on Distribution Channels
RSS
Newsletter?
Conclusions