Some Quick Antenna Stats

As I'm writing this 77 posts are listed on Antenna,

From 34 different feeds.

Common Errors in the Log

The most common error is still to submit the URL to an entry rather than a feed. This is understandable. I don't know how to better clarify the intention. I'll go through the About page sometime soon.

Another some what common error is to submit an http(s) URL! Antenna can only handle gemini, and all URLs starting with http or https are simply blocked. Other non-gemini schemes will simply fail, but so far none has been tried.

Recent Posting History

Since Antenna only keeps the latest 7 days of entries I don't have any hard numbers on the historical development, but I do tail the log and check the capsule every day which gives me some anecdotal sense of it.

We had a brief spike of more than 100 entries in a week sometime before Halloween. Since then the weekly average has dropped a bit. Most notably in the last week. This is understandable as people wind down for the holidays. But for the first time in several months there are other well-known public aggregators that actually lists more entries for the last few days! Almost all entries overlap between the different aggregators, but they each have one or two feeds that appear unique to them.

Custom Filters

I've added a response code 10 prompt to the custom feeds creation. Since a new filter was created every time someone clicked the link a vast majority of filters were empty. That's not really a problem since they'll be filtered away in time, but... The geminispace.info crawler got stuck and created 2000 filters. Sorry 😅

When I count lines in filters I see that a few are actually configured with a couple of rules each. It's nice to see that this feature is useful for some.

Ingestion Rate

Some time ago I changed the ingestion rate from every ten minutes to every five minutes. That means that entries from feeds submitted to Antenna will be listed very shortly after submission. I set the ingestion to run as an independent job because I didn't want the submission page to time out, and I wasn't sure how big the risk of collisions in the database was (it's an SQLite database connected to from a CGI script, but only one instance of any process can write to it at the same time).

With some experience I can now say that this is no problem. My plan is to change so that feeds are ingested immediately upon submission, which allows direct feedback to the submitter as well.

Links

Antenna front page.

Submit the URL to your atom, RSS, or gemsub feed 🙂

-- CC0 ew0k, 2021-11-28