Jiff on 
Tyler on 
Halfway
Here we are, halfway through the year. Time for feedback!
You’ve seen historical Jason, screaming critic Jason, personal-stuff Jason, any of a number of combinations therein. What’s working for this thing? Doing this 5 times a week is no easy matter, but I am enjoying having the location. According to my statistics, I have roughly 2,000 regular readers, although maybe I’m being tricked or maybe it’s more, thanks to cascading feeds.
I’m looking for some idea of what the audience thinks.
Abuse the comments. Thanks.
jeffx
wrote:
I probably count as two readers. I hit the site from work and grab the rss feed. ascii.textfiles.com is the one of three feeds in akregator that never gets the “mark feed as read”. I enjoy your writing style.
Posted on 16-Jun-07 at 10:57 am | Permalink
Andy Baio
wrote:
I like everything you write, but I’m most partial to original reporting (including reporting on your personal life, like the Computer Camp entry) over pure op-ed. Which means I generally like historical Jason and personal-stuff Jason over screaming critic Jason.
Posted on 16-Jun-07 at 12:35 pm | Permalink
fuzz
wrote:
Is it that far through the year already? Blimey!
I particularly enjoyed the “how to make a music video with MC Frontalot” posts, and opf course the always fun “hundreds of teenagers get their innocence removed via the magic of the internets and goatse”
Posted on 16-Jun-07 at 12:43 pm | Permalink
cassiel
wrote:
I don’t read everything you write, but I like the way you think. Probably because we do think in similar ways, not many people do. So I guess it’s the screaming critic Jason that keeps my interest.
Posted on 16-Jun-07 at 3:18 pm | Permalink
Jeff Milner
wrote:
I’m a regular reader via RSS and but I rarely stop into the site.
Posted on 16-Jun-07 at 3:37 pm | Permalink
AngiePen
wrote:
I’m really not into music or demo stuff, but other than that pretty much everything you write about interests me. Keep going the way you’ve been and I’ll keep reading.
Angie
Posted on 16-Jun-07 at 6:05 pm | Permalink
Mike Whalen
wrote:
I honestly like the output. You mix up the topics and that’s great. I enjoy it a lot.
If there was one thing I could change? I really wish your feed would display better in RSS readers. I have used multple ones — Google Reader, NetNewsReader (Newsgator), and Newsgator.com. They all lose all your paragraph formatting. I generally peruse the shortened content and click the site link if I want to read the full article. With everything squished into one paragraph, I frequently find it difficult to find out what the heart of your article is about, thus delaying my decision to go to the site.
Really, though, it’s a minor thing.
Cheers,
Mike..
Posted on 16-Jun-07 at 7:58 pm | Permalink
Jason Scott
wrote:
Mike, make sure you’re using the best feed for the job:
http://ascii.textfiles.com/atom.xml
Posted on 16-Jun-07 at 8:57 pm | Permalink
Manny wrote:
I’ll just chime in and mention that I’m a faithful reader of ASCII. Basically because you write well, and about topics that I’m interested in. And, unlike most weblogs, both personal and group, you never make me hate humanity (not sure why that is). Hope to run into you someday, you’re honestly one of the only online “personalities” that I think I’d really enjoy meeting in person.
Posted on 16-Jun-07 at 10:23 pm | Permalink
Jason wrote:
Yet another faithful RSS reader of yours. I have to be honest and say that I just don’t have time to read everything you write – I just checked, and in a little less than three weeks you wrote upwards of 12,000 words. The average computer based reading (including scrolling) is about 115 words a minute, which means it would have taken 1.7 hours to read only the front page of posts (seems a bit big, though I’m too sleepy to check my simple math).
But like I said, I’m faithful. I’ll read what I can, when I can, and will hopefully remember what you wrote about previously so if I’m interested in the topic, I’ll go back and read your commentary. For now, I’ll agree with Andy Baio and say that I’ll read mostly personal and historical Jason, and any other articles that I have a personal connection with (certain hardware, etc.).
Thanks for putting in all that hard work for our benefits!
Posted on 16-Jun-07 at 11:19 pm | Permalink
Mr. X wrote:
I enjoy the stuff you write. IMHO it’s one of the very few blogs which are worth to read them. The stuff i like least are writings about licenses/Wikipedia. I rarely read entries like this completely. Everything else is excellent.
Posted on 17-Jun-07 at 6:59 am | Permalink
Stephen Gilbert
wrote:
I like the way you’re doing things now. I find all of your projects interesting, and your’s is one of the few feeds that I read every post.
For the record, you have 131 subscribers on Bloglines (combined numbers for your index.rdf and atom.xml feeds).
Posted on 17-Jun-07 at 12:36 pm | Permalink
Wintermute
wrote:
I enjoy pretty much everything you write. I find myself sometimes disagreeing with critic Jason, but he makes me think about where I stand on some of the things he brings up. Everything from historical and personal-stuff Jason is always entertaining as well. I can’t think of a single thing you’ve written that I’ve though “I’ll read that later” and never come back to.
Posted on 18-Jun-07 at 9:20 am | Permalink
Tom W.
wrote:
I am one of the flood of readers you recieved from the goatse prank, but I have settled into a regular routine of reading your site over morning coffee. Your site has made me look at Wikipedia less as an artifact and more as a (dysfunctional) community. However, I don’t give a crap about Creative Commons, but I do find you a bit tough on poor old Cory Doctorow. Other than that, keep up the variety!
Posted on 18-Jun-07 at 11:56 am | Permalink