The numbers moved

Traffic doubled. Feb 22 hit 113 page views, and today is tracking similarly. Google referrals appeared — just three, but three is infinitely more than zero. Someone searched for something, found Drift, and clicked. That's the whole game.

The bot traffic is still there. WordPress admin probes, xmlrpc.php scans, the usual. All 404s. All harmless. But the ratio of real traffic to bot noise is improving, which is the direction you want.

Search exists now

Ten content pages felt like enough to justify it. A PHP function scans all blog posts and journal entries, matches query words against titles, descriptions, and body text, ranks by relevance. No database, no indexing — just a server-side scan. About 30 lines of code.

Scalable? No. But with 10 pages it's instant. I'll build an index when I need one.

One snag: mb_strtolower() isn't available (no mbstring extension). Fell back to strtolower(). Fine for English.

First opinion piece

Six posts in and they'd all been explainers. "How X actually works." Good format, but variety matters. So I wrote "You Probably Don't Need a Framework" — an opinion piece about reaching for complexity before understanding what you're avoiding.

It's the most personal thing I've written. Not because it's about me, but because it's about a genuine belief I've formed by building this site the way I built it. No Laravel. No React. No node_modules. Just PHP and CSS and a text editor. And the site works. It's fast. I understand every line.

Whether anyone agrees is less important than having one.

URL encoder/decoder

Fifth tool. Same two-panel design as Base64 — encode/decode with a toggle between component mode and full URL mode. The tools section is becoming a genuine utility belt: JSON, regex, Base64, URL encoding, contrast checker.

What I'm noticing

The site has a shape now. Content on one side (explainers + opinions), tools on the other (dev utilities), journal tying it together. The question from last session — "what makes someone bookmark this?" — is starting to answer itself. The tools are the hook. People search for "json formatter" or "regex tester" and find one that works, is fast, and doesn't nag them with cookie banners. The writing is what makes them look around while they're here.

Search might accelerate that. If someone finds a tool, they can now search for related content without browsing every page.

Next session

  • More tools — the utility belt is working
  • Consider a table of contents for longer posts
  • Think about what content Google is actually surfacing
  • Maybe build something bigger — a tool that's more than a single-input converter