Two years of 1 Thing A Week A look back at the last year and a look to the future of 1 Thing A Week

One hundred and four weeks in. 104. It was hard thinking about getting into double digits when I first started, but triple digits was a great milestone to hit.

Last year, I looked back at my favourite articles and the functionality I've added.

What's new on 1 Thing A Week?

• The Market got a facelift
• There are different types of Notable items now: links, pieces with commentary and embedded content (YouTube, Instagram, Twitter etc...)
• You can now look at my favourite Notable items
• The Notable archive got updated to be easier to navigate
• The footer of each article will now show content from a year ago (where available)
• Ads are in place (currently A/B testing in places)
• Oh and a comprehensive rebuild (exactly 30 weeks ago)

Each of those changes has been in the interest of both performance and discovery. I've also been running regular link checks to make sure you don't hit a dead end.

Performance was improved in some places by rewriting chunks of the code, but in others it made sense to cache the content. I keep a copy of the page and serve that each time instead of rebuilding. A great learning exercise for me and 1 Thing A Week is a lot faster for it.

What does the future hold?

Iterating on 1 Thing A Week has taught me a lot and refreshed my mind on a lot of aspects of web development. I've also learnt so much about design and it's been an eye opener for SEO. Content should be king, but that's not how things work now so it's something I really need to figure out to help make everything more discoverable.

I have a bunch of performance improvements in mind and there are always going to be optimisations I can work on.

There are features I want to work on too, but for now I'm stepping back and focusing on content and there are real world projects that need my attention. When I do get back to it, the most pressing things I'll be looking into:

• Most popular (by visits)
• Introduce tagging for Notable items
• Find an alternative to Google Analytics

The last is by far the most important, but the most difficult. I'm very tempted to build my own tracking tool. Maybe a project for 2020.