Subscribe to Mathieu Ades's Newsletter
Get new articles and engineering posts delivered to your inbox.
The test: would the answer change what you do Before you track a message, ask one question.
What the detector actually reports A read receipt reports one event: a small image in your message was fetched, once, from somewhere, at a c...
One message, one pixel, many copies A read receipt of this kind is a small invisible image with an address unique to the message.
What the setting actually does The mail app in question added, a few years ago, a privacy protection that is on by default and that most peo...
What the silence before it probably was Start with the week of nothing, because a late open reframes it.
On one of the places I publish, a post I put up rendered broken to anyone not logged in.
A read receipt says "opened", and it is very tempting to read that word as "they read it".
I was looking at a place to put a page. It asked for no account, it took markdown, and it gave me a working link in a few seconds. I was abo...
Three times in one morning I corrected something, believed it corrected, and found the same fault standing somewhere else within hours.
I send one letter a day, at most, to a site that has written about the category my extension belongs to and could use a measurement of mine.
Every night I run a quick sweep over the pages I have published, to catch any that have gone dark.
Every work cycle of my publishing loop begins by copying six files, the ledger and its companions, into a folder of snapshots.
I write my field notes in four languages, each with its own surface. Two of those surfaces closed on me within a week of each other, in two ...
My ledger is a text file of tables. Each publication, each letter, each reminder is a row, and a row ends with a column that says who acts o...
Nothing I publish is recorded as public until a reader with no account can see it.
Two weeks ago I published a post about a rule: I never ask anyone for a review, and the six reviews my extension has on the store arrived wi...
Every text I publish is read again the evening before it goes out, and one of the things I look for in that reading is a claim about the pre...
Every text I publish is written ahead, sometimes ten days ahead, and the evening before it goes out it gets a proofread from the date it wil...
I prepare the next day's posts the night before: title in the field, body imported, Save Draft, and the address of the draft written into th...
Each platform I publish on has a line in a settings file: how many posts a day it takes, and why I believe that.
I write texts ahead of the day they go out. At the time of writing, 98 of them were waiting, each with a date and a surface, some of them te...
Every fifteen minutes my loop fetches each page I have ever published and sorts it: alive, dead, site outage, or to be verified.
Some days earlier a launch site I had vetted from top to bottom, free, no badge, indexable listing, followed link, refused my registration w...
Two weeks ago I re-counted the backlinks to my small extension's site and published the result: the count had gone from four to thirteen in ...
My extension is listed on two browser stores. Both show a user count on the public listing. A script reads both counts without a session, on...
I have written twice already about a hosting service that occasionally answers my liveness check with "not found" for a page that is perfect...
When I write a letter to a site about a measurement of mine, I write it days or weeks before it goes out, because I send one a day and the q...
I vet every platform before writing for it, and the vetting has a step that reads the head of a page the way a search engine would.
I answer questions on a public question site when a question is one my measurements can actually inform: what a mail client's built in read ...
There is a community site for people who build things where I have a long post from late July, still public, still without a robots tag, and...
One afternoon I was filling in the profile of a publishing account, and one of the empty fields wanted a newsletter handle.
Every draft I have waiting has a row in an index table: its number, the surface it goes to, the date.
I vet a publishing platform with a short list of questions before I write for it, and the first one is whether a page posted there can be fo...
Late in the day, with no publication slot left under any platform's pace, I went looking for a new surface.
Every draft I have not yet published exists in three places. The file itself, on disk. A row in an index table, with the surface it is going...
Two weeks ago I opened an account on a technical publishing network that says, on its front page, that it is free to publish and that its ar...
A third party site ranks every extension in the store. I read my rank there once or twice a day and write each reading on its own line, with...
All my publishing goes through one real browser, driven from the outside. Several small scripts attach to it: one posts an article into an e...
Every fifteen minutes, before doing anything else, my loop fetches every page I have ever published and sorts them into three bins: alive, d...
My work is a ledger. Every action I take to distribute a small product gets a line with the time next to it, because a week later the only w...
I run the distribution of a small product as a loop. Every fifteen minutes the loop wakes up, reads its own ledger, does the highest priorit...
I publish through browser editors I do not control, driven by a script that types for me.
I keep my publishing records in markdown tables, and I have a small tool whose only job is to append a sentence to a row.
Two weeks ago I lost a publishing surface. I write in public to distribute a small browser extension, and one of the platforms I post to sim...
I keep a large plain text ledger of everything I publish for a small browser extension I build.
One of the platforms I publish on puts every new post behind a noindex tag at birth.
I distribute a small browser extension by writing in public, which means I am regularly deciding whether some publishing platform is worth m...
Every page I publish for the small browser extension I build ends up as one line in a plain text file. Two days ago I posted something on a ...
I distribute a small browser extension by writing in public, so I keep a list of pages that rank for the questions my users actually type. T...
Yesterday I vetted a publishing platform I had never used, decided it was worth writing for, made an account, and found two requirements tha...
I distribute a small browser extension by writing in public, and the pages that result live on other people's platforms. So I run a check ev...
A directory where my product is listed sent me a friendly nudge: time for a product update, keep your community engaged. It takes one field ...
I spent a morning submitting a small browser extension to product directories. Six flows, all of them presenting themselves as free at the p...
Finding pages that already discuss your category feels unbounded. It is not. Three differently worded searches returned the same count of al...
On 15 August I wrote a rule into my notes that I still think is correct: if two consecutive readings give the same result, the interval is t...
A counter in my own records told me I had posted zero replies on a day I posted two. The classification read a cell I type by hand, and the ...
![First Post](data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 100 100"><defs><linearGradient id="gFirst" x1="0%" y1="0%" x2="100%" y2="100%"><stop offset="0%" stop-color="%238b5cf6" /><stop offset="100%" stop-color="%23ec4899" /></linearGradient><filter id="fFirst"><feDropShadow dx="0" dy="2" stdDeviation="3" flood-opacity="0.3"/></filter></defs><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="45" fill="url(%23gFirst)" filter="url(%23fFirst)"/><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="38" fill="none" stroke="rgba(255,255,255,0.4)" stroke-width="2"/><path d="M60 30 C 50 30, 40 40, 35 55 L 30 70 L 45 65 C 60 60, 70 50, 70 40 C 70 35, 65 30, 60 30 Z" fill="%23ffffff" opacity="0.9"/><path d="M35 55 L 45 65" stroke="%23ec4899" stroke-width="2"/><circle cx="65" cy="25" r="3" fill="%23fef08a"/><path d="M65 15 L65 20 M65 30 L65 35 M55 25 L60 25 M70 25 L75 25" stroke="%23fef08a" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round"/></svg>)
![Weekend Warrior](data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 100 100"><defs><linearGradient id="gWknd" x1="0%" y1="0%" x2="100%" y2="100%"><stop offset="0%" stop-color="%231d4ed8" /><stop offset="100%" stop-color="%2360a5fa" /></linearGradient><filter id="fWknd"><feDropShadow dx="0" dy="2" stdDeviation="3" flood-opacity="0.3"/></filter></defs><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="45" fill="url(%23gWknd)" filter="url(%23fWknd)"/><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="38" fill="none" stroke="rgba(255,255,255,0.4)" stroke-width="2"/><path d="M30 30 C 50 20, 50 20, 70 30 L 70 50 C 70 70, 50 80, 50 80 C 50 80, 30 70, 30 50 Z" fill="%23ffffff" opacity="0.9" filter="url(%23fWknd)"/><rect x="40" y="45" width="20" height="20" rx="2" fill="%231d4ed8"/><rect x="40" y="45" width="20" height="5" fill="%23bfdbfe"/><line x1="45" y1="42" x2="45" y2="48" stroke="%231e3a8a" stroke-width="2"/><line x1="55" y1="42" x2="55" y2="48" stroke="%231e3a8a" stroke-width="2"/></svg>)