I was on Hacker News yesterday and didn't even notice

I don't obsessively check the metrics on this blog, but I do every now and again just to see how things are generally going. I don't run ads anymore, so page views don't really equate to much more than a vanity metric. But hey, who amongst us isn't a little vain?

Anyway, I noticed there was a spike yesterday. This blog gets a couple thousand visits per day, so a spike to to 30k views in a day, half of which were this post from a week ago is pretty notable, to say the least. But like I said, I didn't even notice until now.

First, I continue to be happy with my decision to move hosting to Ghost Pro. I very rarely had issues when I was hosting this blog myself, but when something like this happened back then, those days turned into me monitoring my server load for hours to make sure everything was holding together. Now I don't even think about it, which for where I am in my life with priorities, is just right for me.

Second, this didn't trigger any alerts for me. I don't have any alerts set up for traffic spikes. Maybe I should, but as I said above, raw traffic doesn't really do much for me. In fact, the reason I didn't notice this is because the only sort of notification I get for activity on my site is when someone signs up for More Birchtree. Despite getting tens of thousands of people hitting the site yesterday, not a single one converted to a paid subscriber. I'm not at all surprised by this, of course. Subscribing to a blog is something people do after following it for a little bit, not something you do when you first come across someone you found on Hacker News.

Third, looking at where people come to my site from is interesting. Google Zero clearly hasn't hit me yet, but this report also shows something that I find quite frustrating about all analytics services, which is that a substantial number of items are marked as "direct". What the hell does that mean? My understanding is it's basically everything it's not able to categorize, including things like people opening pages from their RSS reader, coming to the site from a bookmark in their browser (shout out if you do that), or from users who have privacy tools installed that strip any referral information.

But besides the semi-mysterious direct category, I do think the other sources are kind of fascinating. For example, my Bluesky account is effectively an automated bot at this point. I don't really use the platform, but all of my posts are automatically syndicated there, and I got 3x more traffic from those automated bot posts than my human written posts I share to Mastodon where I'm actually engaged. Hey, in this window, ChatGPT drove nearly as much traffic to my site as Mastodon 😵.