Fifteen years ago today I published the first post on this website. Turned out a bit lucky that the first post still holds up fairly well today, even though there was a somewhat recent update. The second post did not age so well.
I started out the weblog because I was reading a lot of other Mac admins’ web blogs and thought: “I can do that, too.” And it turns out that I could, even though it took quite a few years of infrequent and mostly ignored posts to find my voice, rhythm, and audience.
Much has changed in those fifteen years and even in the last five years since I last celebrated the anniversary.
Turns out, a few things led to a peak in traffic in 2020, mostly some really successful posts and projects, most of which aren’t really relevant any more. (The exceptions are quite exceptional, though.) The first year or two of the pandemic proved as quite the catalyst for blog posts. Google’s ever changing algorithm probably caused some of the decline. (I never really cared about optimizing the site, still don’t.) I also split out the weekly newsletter to a new domain and service. Even though the weekly news summary has more than doubled subscriptions since 2020, that traffic is now missing from Scripting OS X.
In the last two years, I also suspect that traffic is also leaking towards LLMs. Rather than reading a post on a weblog, people prefer to get the pre-digested summary or solution from their favored LLM. This results in far less traffic to all websites.
Nevertheless, I do not consider the website as a failure. I still get plenty of feedback on relevant posts and content. It fills me with immense joy and pride when people come up to me at conferences and meetings to tell me they found something useful for their work and that is all the motivation I need to continue.
In the last few years, my “real” job, which I enjoy very much, has also required its fair share of time and attention and the remaining energy mostly goes towards MacAdmins.news. I plan to continue to write about things that interest me, when I find the time and energy to do so. There are some long term plans and I am very curious to see how they are going to turn out.
Thank you all so much for reading! On to the next fifteen years!
PS: Five years ago, I was hinting that the name of this weblog might change. I have owned (and been paying for) scripting.blog for quite a while now. Never actually pulled the lever, obviously. I feel that domain name is very close to Dave Winer’s scripting.com and I don’t want to even pretend that my small site is in any way comparable. I also have scriptingmacs.com and scriptingmacos.com but I am reluctant to use those, because I have both hope that Apple will allow more powerful automations on their other platforms and some fear that the Mac platform will lose relevance. (Probably not any time soon.)
Even though Apple has changed the name, I am going to stick with “Scripting OS X.” (For now.)
(In another five years, I might need to explain where the name comes from…)