I don't want to write to a deadline. I want to write because I enjoy it. I want to write for me.

The disturbing notion of chasing pageviews can damage the quality of writing on the web. I don't want to fall victim to it.

One of my favourite improvements to Chasing Perfection, having moved the site to Squarespace, is the fantastic Squarespace iOS app. Unfortunately for me, the app makes it far too easy to see how much traffic I'm getting. This results in me needing to exercise great self control to avoid Chasing Pageviews instead of Perfection.

The idea of needing to keep up website traffic could actually be detrimental to its own goal, over time. trying to drive visitors to a website constantly results in a "boy who's crying wolf" scenario – think of the wolf as quality. If I keep sending out poor quality links on Twitter, people will eventually stop clicking on them. I try to avoid this. In fact, I actively strive for the opposite. I don't post a link to every post on this website, for example.

Trying to drive visitors to a website might work in short spurts, but it isn't a sustainable practice over time. Sustainability and natural growth are important.

For me, being sustainable is more important than having unplanned, crazy traffic for a single day. I'd rather have steady traffic in the form of a few thousand visitors per week than no visitors one week, followed by twenty thousand in one afternoon.

So, with this service announcement out of the way, let's get back to the regular schedule. I'm going to keep writing for me.