It’s almost odd how this year has felt. While over all, it feels like the year has flown by, when I look back at specific events, I can’t help but feel like those things occurred ages ago. Not sure if that’s a good feeling or not.

I do feel fairly happy that I’ve mostly been sticking to this website. I got the domain and built the site back in 2024, but I never felt confident enough to write. Hell, outside of answering odd questions my friends had like in the case of consiousness, I haven’t really told people about it. I guess that’s what I’m looking to change for this coming year. I don’t expect to have anyone actively reading, but I’m looking to say more in the hopes of providing info or opinion for someone who does.

With the increasing prevalence of AI summaries for everything, most news and blogging sites have seen substantial decreases in traffic. As such, many websites have begun to shift how they provide and communicate information to users. Now websites are typically making one of two moves:

1. Optimize the site and articles for webscraping in the hopes of appearing in the summary so that a user may click of on it for additional context
2. Build a reputation for your work and limit webscraping, so that users must go to the site to see the content
3. Focus the site of more niche or personable avenues to build relationships and rapport with the readers

Most business and news agencies have of course gone with the first option, have continued to sell themselves out to be on the front page¹. Some sites have begun adding Cloudflare to block webcrawlers because they know their content is more important than the quick clicks, like Atlas Obscura. Finally, you have sites like mine or most other blog sites like pluralistic.net where reach isn’t necessarily the focus as much as just having something to say.

I think what I want to do with this new year is really focus on just saying something. Around the end of the year when I was working on D&D or talking about my new keyboard, I was actually having fun with my writing. While over this year I really haven’t found a niche that I wanted to focus on, I think what people would want to see is a little more of just me and what do I do have to say. Is it anything of real value? No, but it might be some use to people.

In case you’re curious, no, I didn’t pass the retest either. I don’t think I necessarily lack anything, but instead I think I just have a different workflow from what’s provided for me on the test. I don’t work in system administration, so there are a lot of things that were tested that I just have no familiarity with, like multi unit networking. At least I have the essentials to flaunt, I suppose.