A JustUseEmail Update

Hello friends of Email,

Busyness has kept me from my love of email and this website. In this last half of 2024 and beyond, I intend to post much more frequently. But first, a few updates about this website on the topics of Website Statistic Tracking, Email News Roundups, Rotting Decay of Email Haters, and Authenticity in Writing; Keeping the Hope Alive.

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Website Statistic Tracking

First, I have removed JetPack from WordPress from the backend. Why was I using JetPack? Ease of use (it’s got some good features) and my distaste for Google Analytics as a tool from a company that consumes too much of our browsing habits for its own profitability.

However, as much as I love WordPress the open-source software and the community that surrounds it (check out the new and improved https://learn.wordpress.org, as an example), I’ve had a sour taste in my mouth about some of WordPress the Company (run by Automattic) and its commercial offerings. I totally get the profit needs of Automattic and I don’t blame them at all, but they’ve gone all-pro and left little to the “little guy”.

First, their prices are per website and they aren’t competitive with much of the mid-to-low tier of blogs and websites. I once built websites for small businesses and I don’t know too many of those “mom and pop” shops that would pay for the range of suggested services that WordPress Corporate says one should have on their WordPress site. $5/month for “security”, $5/month for “scanning”, $5/month for Akimset anti-spam, $8.25/month for “search” (??), and now $8.33/month for statistics. Those are annually-based prices and JetPack lets you combine services for less. JetPack admittedly has a free tier if you don’t offer paid services or products (honesty policy, it seems).

Second, JetPack has, in its own way, hoovered up our collective data so that WordPress the company can learn about our visitors’ web surfing habits. What it does with that, I don’t know, nor am I assuming ill intent on their part. But it’s enough to make me and others leery.

Third, JetPack is a plugin beast. It’s the largest plugin in most WordPress installs and consumes the most hooks, data, and so forth.

Fourth, one of its key features is the use of a CDN. Frankly, I think CDNs are overrated, add unnecessary complexity to the internet, centralize control with other data brokers, and more. The promise is that a visitor from Taiwan will see an image a bit faster with a CDN than they would by having to grab it from my actual server somewhere in North America. I just don’t care. While the implementation of a CDN can be quite easy with a service like JetPack, complexity lives underneath the hood. For a high-powered web app, like Facebook or Jira, I can understand why big corporations use CDNs to considerably improve experience. But for blogs and basic business websites? Overkill.

Lastly, why even track statistics? For me, it’s mostly a sanity check if it’s been quiet in my email inbox for a while. It’s a “nice to see” but not a “need to see”. If I were to get pummeled with traffic, I probably wouldn’t know it unless my email inbox also started to fill up, or comments increased. When I once was briefly high up in the Hacker News website, I didn’t really know, but my stats told me where the traffic was coming from.

I’ve often told businesses (that spend tons of resources tracking their so-called marketing efforts) that stats are mostly a “justify my job” game for marketing teams. The marketing team wants to show that the latest campaign increased the traffic to the website by millions of views. But unless that higher traffic converts to actual sales, it’s meaningless hype.

Same with my small corner of the internet here at JustUseEmail. If I hear from more people, I suppose that’s one way of measuring success. But that could come because I wrote a more engaging article that impacted 10 of the 50 visitors to it. Or it could be because Hacker News inflamed the passions of some trolls and so I got 10 comments and 5,000 visitors. For me, honestly, the first is preferable, so the bar graphs in statistics are, relatively speaking, a bit of a fireworks show: lots of boom and pops, but no actual explosions on earth impacting wins and losses.

I decided to revisit Google Analytics. After deciding to drop JetPack from my WordPress installation, I should have known better to see what the Google gang was up to. Not only have they pretty much gone full-commercial, they pretty much tell you upfront they cater to businesses now. Sure, you can use it for your tiny blog somewhere, but why? Also, I just couldn’t justify the privacy invasion on my readers. (I should add that Google Analytics the JavaScript is easy to install, but good luck making much sense of their reports these days).

My next visit was to my host’s built-in stats. I’m a big fan of AWStats. It analyzes your server’s Apache logs and is written in that stalwart beauty, Perl. Like any server log analyzer, it doesn’t rely upon JavaScript. So not only does it not require any computing power of your machine, my dear visitor, it also is 100% accurate, since even those few visitors without JavaScript enabled are still logged by Apache for their GET requests.

However, it turns out my current host, Dreamhost, decided to implement their own web stats system which is, to say the least, convoluted. Of course it is. They’ve all but killed cPanel, because cPanel got too greedy for many big hosts. They have their own self-created install tools and systems which, while workable and okay, are just one host’s way of managing their clients’ websites.

Want to switch to someone else? You’ll have to relearn everything from FTP and MySQL setups, to SSL Certs, to even stats. At one point in time, nearly every Linux web host used WHM and cPanel. I even managed my own WHM for a number of years. What you learned there applied everywhere. Now every host is in a rush to make their own WordPress installer and scheme up marketing buzz about it, as if WordPress’s own famous 5-minute installation was too arduous for the admins. (Admittedly, WordPress seems to have abandoned the slogan of their 5-minute installation and now seems to steer installers to hosts that have pre-built installers… sigh… of course they did).

Much like the mass of communication tools attempting to replace email, despite email’s obvious superiority, we have the same tomfoolery in the web hosting space.

For now, I’ve discovered a wonderful tool called Independent Analytics. I must recommend them for those that need a quick solution that’s built right into WordPress (as a plugin). One-click install into your WordPress site and you’re off to the races. All the stats are just stored right into your WordPress database and can be backed up with it. As of this writing, their paid plan (thank you – only one paid plan, not some fake “most popular” plan of 3) is only $54/year and looks to be well worth it for those that need to track campaigns, form submission tracking (this looks interesting to me, but I need some forms!), and, wait for it… email reports!

That’s right. They send your stat reports by email. Not Slack, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp, or even IRC. By email! Imagine that. The two developers (Ben Sibley and Andrew Mead) were probably sitting around going, “Maybe people would like our software to be proactive and send WordPress administrators reports about their website statistics. I wonder what system we should use to send them? FedEx? AOL Chat? Slack?” and then probably deep in their souls they heard a truth bubbling up. Just Use Email. Well, at least to start!

The interface is oh-so-clean and blazing fast. I would imagine on highly-trafficked websites that the additional database write on visits might slightly slow the traffic. Problems I’d like to have. Meanwhile, give Independent Analytics a visit and see if they can’t solve some problems for you. (And no, they aren’t paying me to say this, or even know about this post).

Meanwhile, I’d love to find a reliable and hosting provider that is (a) privacy-focused, (b) offers multi-site hosting at a fair cost, (c) uses cPanel/WHM or a close approximate, and (d) is located in a country that is not hostile to the U.S., but is not too friendly to the U.S. either.

Seems like if I find hosting providers in Switzerland or Europe, they think they are better than the U.S. and act arrogantly so. Let’s all be friends here, folks. You’re using technology the U.S. built, established, and forged long before you bought your first Linux server, so don’t get all big for your britches just because the U.S. and some countries are part of 5-eyes or similar. Have some respect for the work that was done before.

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Email News Roundups

In the past, I would post roundups of little blurbs about email news and I’d do it in a roundup of 5-8 articles at a time, often making small comments. My thinking was that no one wanted to get their feed reader pinged with just one article link and a paragraph or two from me about it. So, I’d save them up.

I’ve got probably 100 saved at the moment (not all worthy of publication). I’m looking for suggestions on the best way to do this. I’d like to share them sooner than later (especially when the link is recently published and ‘hot’), but I don’t want to clog up JustUseEmail with hundreds of one and two paragraph articles.

My understanding is I could create a category called “Email News” and there would be a separate RSS feed for that, and just categorize those link blurbs there. Still, I believe the main feed would still capture those, unless I get into some custom plugin. I certainly could set the main page to exclude Email News articles and have a separate page for them on JustUseEmail. The UI would be fine, but the RSS feed would get bloated or busy. I’d love to hear suggestions.

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Rotting Decay of Email Haters

I’ve noticed a trend and I won’t call out anyone on this (yet). When some loon publishes an anti-email screed, and I link to it, usually in an effort to debunk their childish communication notions, it sometimes disappears off the internet.

I’m not saying it’s out of public humiliation that it disappears. It could be typical link rot, or it could be that it was published on a blog, then later republished on one of those Medium or Substack platforms, then later moved form those platforms, and never found its way back onto the original blog. Or if it did, I can’t find it.

I don’t know what to do about this quite yet. It’s not a problem, per se, but it does make my commentary tricky to read if my reader visits the original article link only to find it AWOL. I have a link checking bot that tells me such glum news, so I do my best to update links when possible.

Sometimes craziness disappears off the internet. Perhaps that’s a good thing and I shouldn’t complain. I thought about saving the original article as a PDF and posting to JustUseEmail under my commentary, but even if that’s legal (and I don’t know that it is), why perpetuate someone finding it via a web search and reading malformed ideology. If it’s gone, it’s gone.

For now, I intend to leave up my commentary, though. At the least, I hope it’ll deter the original author from reposting their email hatred elsewhere.

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Authenticity in Writing; Keeping the Hope Alive

Lastly, I hope to be a bit more authentic in my writing. While my original hope for writing many dozens of articles still occupies no small headspace of mine, and there is certainly a need for technical articles on the topic of email, I also hope to transmogrify JustUseEmail to a slightly more broad topic of technology abuse we are all suffering under. I did that slightly above as I ranted about JetPack.

I also hope to write in a more friendly voice, use less hyperlinks in my writing (as I find those distracting – and hope to figure out how to easily use footnotes¹ for most of them), and to help keep the hope alive. Let me say something about that last part.

I quoted C.S. Lewis in my last post, How deliberate are your relationships?. The smaller part of that quote, and perhaps the most frequently heard part, is the portion that reads, “The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.'”

Many of the emails I’ve received from great people all over the world have a flair that reminds me of that Lewis quote. Perhaps I’m exaggerating what I read in those emails, but I get the distinct feeling that there are many others burdened, frustrated, or just plain tired of the technology slog foisted upon us at work and in our personal lives.

Part of those feelings seem to stem from the epidemic of tools we must navigate to accomplish even simple tasks. I sometimes get the impression that those of us who feel we’ve been unwittingly enslaved to convoluted and reckless communication tools, among other sad software choices, are living in silos, without much voice, their opinions long since smashed by the Decision Makers around them.

I have no illusions here. Email has won. Email is winning each day. Email will rule over all its current crop of competitors. Still, sometimes I feel like this is more the Church of Email; without regular sermons, the parish will wither. I see myself as no preacher, but perhaps a bit of a pastor, in that regard. I can comfort, console, and remind us all that we’re winning, but I also expect my “flock” to be strong and courageous, to fight the good fight, and to die willingly on the cross of modern software if we must, never bowing the knee even unto the last breath.

There are many such pastors out there. I barely qualify. Like most pastors, I’ve been thrust into the fracas, not entirely against my will, but also not entirely of my will either. I need encouragement, too. I need a community, too. (And lest someone suggest a Subreddit or the like, I think I’d find that too dispiriting, to see 5 members ranting, and 95 merely lurking).

But one thing I can do is post more often. Continue to build up visits here. Reach more people. And pave the way for a larger community of not just ad-hoc email supporters, but those who would resist the tyranny of Electron apps, siloed communication tools, 17 different user interfaces to master at one workplace alone, and bloated and nonperformant tools that not only disobey Unix’s “Do One Thing Well” mantra, but seem to be striving for the polar opposite: do many things as poorly as possible.

In posting more often, albeit likely shorter posts, my hope is to give other’s a “You too?” moment in their week so that they might brighten their outlook a smidge, curl their lips into a half-smile at least, flex their hand into a fist of rebellion, even if for a moment and under their desk, and cause them to remember that not all of modernity is a lost cause. That even this relatively new technology called blog publishing, can help us celebrate and promote a slightly older technology called email, and can remind us that, even outside of tech, that the old ways are not always the olden ways, but sometimes the better ways.

Until next time… keep @ing your friends and family and show them that you care more than a 👍.

1. Apparently, it’s literally quite simple in recent versions of WordPress. Who knew? ↩︎