This site was horribly broken only moments ago and, by all accounts, had been for some time. How long? I'm not entirely sure to be honest. When you selected a permanent link, or request a page directly, you were shown the homepage. That's pretty major. I figured it out, so no big deal.

I began by looking through my javascript libraries, then Typekit, next my CDN. Cloudflare seemed like the place to start, with all of the minification and other magic that takes place in the background. After a few minutes perusing, I had a thought.

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I don't keep stats on this website (I can't imagine what I'd do with that information) but I am using CloudFlare, which does log some of your information. Turns out that this site serves an infinitesimally small number of people, while machines (“robuts” in ’50s parlance) eat the lion's share of my bandwidth. No real surprise there.

What got me thinking was the growing number of visits by bots. I began to wonder: what possible value does this little website provide for my most voracious visitors? Those hot, number-crunching CPU's that enjoy my website so much that they turn up hundreds of times a day. I'd like to think that beyond the search queries their little algorithms handle, they enjoy their visits to my door. Perhaps, in aggregate, the metadata (or was that meta-metadata?) surrounding my website is coalescing into something more tangible and solid, like the rings of Saturn forming out of bits of dust and debris.

Maybe… just maybe, we could talk about it sometime. You know, catch up after a hard day's slog. Me, from meatspace, and you (can I refer to you in the singular?) from the space between the ones and zeros and coils of fiber optic cabling.

Either that, or you could just let me know when you notice that something is broken—a notification or an email would do.

Just think about it, okay?