My thoughts on the first 100 days of lzon.ca

The title of this post is a lie, it’s been 114 days since I setup the git repo for this site and created the first commit. Clickbait aside, what isn’t a lie is that it’s been a while since I wrote a post about what I’ve been doing with the site, and how I’ve been thinking about it. So, if you were wondering this is what has been happening lately on lzon.ca.

Rubber Duck Digest

I’ve started a series recently that I call Rubber Duck Digest. The posts here are meant to be satirical news articles, similar to The Onion or The Beaverton. I’ve never really written any comedy before, even while I was in school (at least as far as I can remember…). I’ve been having fun writing these articles, I think it’s been a great mental exercise. Posts of this kind require good story telling, wit, and of course humour. Writing these have been both fun and challenging, which is a great combination.

If you want to start reading Rubber Duck Digest, I recommend you read this first, it’s my favourite so far.

Daily Grateful

Daily Grateful is the series that I created at the very beginning of the site, and so far I believe it is working very well as a format. I was inspired to create the series by John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed. Just as he does, I use my Daily Grateful posts to explain something very mundane, or to give simple life advice, with the common thread through all the posts being some form of attachment to my personal experience. I’ve been treating this series as a form of memoir. AFAIK, John Green regards The Anthropocene Reviewed in the same way.

A weirdly popular Post

I posted a guide that has been receiving very consistent traffic, as per my analytics software. It’s not a lot, but every other post has completely died after the first day-or-two. I see that the traffic is coming from search engines, which indicates to me that I must have found a solution to a really common problem. I believe this post counts as one of my first pieces of evergreen content, which is great to see!

Hacker News

This was completely unexpected, but I have managed to have two posts reach the front page of Hacker News! I began submitting posts to the site a few weeks back, and they did get a small amount of attention. Usually an up vote or two, and may be a positive comment. But then I posted this in the early afternoon on March 28th. I went to read HN in the evening and my freaking post was no. 7 on the front page. I was completely taken a-back, I was not expecting at all to see it, even on the deeper pages. If that wasn’t exciting enough, I then posted this the following day and it too hit the front page (a bit further down).

If you were interested to know, my analytics software matomo was able to see between 7,000 - 10,000 hits on each post. This would be smaller than the true number, due to advertising and tracker blocking, but that’s the minimum bound.

I have also received zero donations to any of the accounts that I have listed on the homepage. I did find that surprising, but otherwise completely unconcerning. I never intended this to be a real source of income, and donations were meant to be a bonus.

Speaking of donations, if you want to throw some money at me right now, here’s my Ko-fi and buymeacoffee.com links. If not, I promise to not be offended. 🤞

Web Development

I said in my initial post that I was using this site to develop my skill as a web developer. That is still very much the case. Since beginning work on this site I’ve built my own sass/css framework, and turned what was a mess of Javascript into neat and tidy Typescript files, with a fully integrated build system. I used Claude Code to write ancillary scripts and build systems, as well as asking it for general advice and guidance. For these use cases, I’ve loved using Claude Code. The times that I have found myself becoming frustrated was when I was asking the AI to do too much, such as implement entire features and functions on the site. Coding AI doesn’t work well for me if I’m not the one in the driver’s seat, or if it is doing too much of the cognitive work on my behalf.

I’m continuing to develop the site, but it does most definitely feel like a mature project now. There’s a lot of cruft in the code, and for now I want to try and clean it all out.

Conclusion

I love lzon.ca. This site means a lot to me, and to work on it is genuinely meaningful. That would be a good thing in any context, but since I’ve been unemployed for over a year this has meant much more to me. It’s made a huge difference in my life.

I’m here now, and am grateful to be able to work on this site.

Thank you for reading. If you liked this post, let me know! You can email me at mail@lzon.ca, or reach out through one of my social accounts linked on the homepage.