The end of the HTTP series
Last year I quit my job at Yelp, and wanted to be a more active blogger again. I thought it would be a neat idea to write 1 post per week, one for each HTTP status.
This was quite an undertaking, and I ended up having to write 67 blog posts, one each week.
Some stats:
- 67 HTTP statuses.
- 70 blog posts written.
- 18091 words written.
- Articles written in 9 cities, 5 countries.
- 53,511 page views.
Was it worth it? I don’t really know. I had higher hopes in terms of popularity. Most of the traffic comes from search results and hotlinks, but I don’t think I achieved what I had really hoped: build a bit more of a consistent audience.
I think part of the problem with building audiences is that people don’t really subsribe to RSS feeds anymore. I offered a twitter feed and a mailing list as well, but who wants to receive more emails? It seems that most people consume their technical content from aggregrators like Hackenernews and silos like Medium.
It feels like a big loss that RSS feeds have gone out of fashion, not just for me but also the industry. I still miss the blogging revolution of the mid-2000’s. Or maybe HTTP statuses are just wayy too boring, and I mistook my own interest with everyone else’s.
Still, I’m glad that I saw it all the way through, and it’s nice to see that people seem to find these pages on google, or use them as a reference. There’s definitely a few in there that have some nuance, so I hope I positively contributed to the API ecosystem.
For the few that followed this series, thank you!