Jan 12, 2026: tcdb smoke test

Yesterday I decided to incorporate some tcdb functionality into my process and I dropped the brandon jennings link onto his page on the site. Basically, you can start a forum post by player, team, set, and any number of levels.

The feature is underutilized at that granular level, so there are a dozen or so cases where I am the only one to have posted on a player or team. With that in mind, I'm probably going to continue to play and slowly take over the forums with my cross platform content.

It's also a good way to evolve my understanding around some of the functionality within vercel, the server infrastructure I'm running this site off of. As an example, I've got a variety of communities (or social media) that I'll eventually start to leave breadcrumbs in to learn more about referrers.

That forum post on tcdb got me 18 referrals before it eventually fell off the homepage. First, 18 is pretty good for a first crack, and second, not many people are enthused about brandon jennings so the engagement died on the vine immediately. Still, interesting data point.

In non-tcdb news, how about Germany and France showing up? One person from each country somehow found the homepage, and my German pal actually read the homepage's instructions. How do I know that? Because I could see the pages they visited and the order they were visited. Kinda fun.

The accounts.google.com referrals remind me to give a shout out to lulu and donnie, my two most loyal readers. Each has logged into the site with their Google account and both have used the comments feature. BTW lulu, I don't know when I will add the feature that emails me when comments are dropped in chronicles (asked here). I also want to add reply functionality so I can tell you both I love you directly where you engage.

Since we are talking numbers, let's take a detour into looking at how people access the site:

First of all, I wanna know who visited the site from a Linux device. That's pretty hardcore - and I'm pretty sure it's a random hit from the internet somewhere. If it's you, and you have my number, text me. ha

For you mobile users, know that I basically don't test any of my content on a mobile device because it's just not that serious and that's just enough extra work that I don't do it unless I'm targeting a mobile feature. It's a testament to the skill with which the bot has utilized the appropriate technology to ensure accessibilty on all devices.

We'll close with a look into the numbers and data I check multiple times a day (like a psychopath):

Last 7 days have been good.

Overall, I can pretty much get 100-125 page views without doing a single thing (other than dropping content), and then if I intentionally send out links to various group chats or forums, I can pretty easily clear 200 a week as you see above.

In the first month or two of the site I was sending out a lot more messages to a lot more people to see just how much engagement I could get by forcing the issue. In the last month or so, I've focused more on how I can goose these numbers simply by adding features or shaping the content in a way that naturally leads to more engagement.

TL;DR: If you don't click the links like I ask you to, it makes me sad.