Why I started Sanity Media

If you have watched The Social Dilemma, read Stolen Focus or Hooked you probably already know that present-day social media is designed to be addictive. The more time you spend online, the more money social media companies make.

You may also be aware of how social media algorithms can inadvertently create echo chambers, where people are only exposed to views they already agree with. This leads to increased polarization and political extremism.

I’m trying to build a service that's more down to earth. A place where you can log in, read some news or stories that interest you, and then forget about it until the next day. No infinite scrolls, no constant streams of notifications, and no incentive to keep checking the site throughout the day. While it might be a hard task to remove echo chambers altogether, I hope can at least limit them.

How Sanity works

Here are the main features in a nutshell:

• All posts created on a given day are published simultaneously at midnight UTC time.
• You can only make a single post a day - make it count.
• No infinite scrolling - the number of posts you’ll see is limited.
• You can upvote and downvote posts - but there’s a combined limit of ten a day.
• The algorithms are simple. For example, everyone s...

What should we build next?

We've just finished comments and added some UI/UX improvements to the site, making posts easier to read and the website, I hope, prettier and more aesthetically pleasing. What should we focus on next?

I think notifications would be useful, so that you can see when someone comments or upvotes your posts. This would be limited to a single notification sent once a day that contains a summary of everything relevant that happened.

Anything else that you think Sanity is missing or could do better? Let me know in the comments 💬

Sanity SEO Performance After 9 Months

Still only get 0-5 clicks a day but things are heading in the right direction.

Impressions

Clicks

Crawl Stats

Any tips on how to coerce Googlebot to crawl more?

Feature announcement 🥳 -> Comments

You can now comment on other posts on Sanity. And you can comment on other people's comments. It's not perfect yet and I'll be making UX improvements here and there over the coming weeks but the essentials are there.

You can leave up to 5 comments a day, so make them count!

Strange spike in Sanity traffic

A weird thing happened yesterday, Sanity got this surge of traffic from the US:

Google is the only referrer listed but that only explains 20 visitors and is consistent with the traffic Sanity usually gets:

It's almost entirely from users on Mac and Windows devices, all desktop.

I wonder what it could be, any ideas?

My money is on bot traffic, because it looks like multiple pages were each visited once, as opposite to a single page going viral.

I've also sent out a few CVs the other day so maybe it's a company checking out my work?

Sanity Media is a place to post your increasingly unhinged thoughts

has anyone noticed that a lot of these posts are trending toward the unhinge? Has anyone noticed that many of the media we consume now seems to trend towards the unhinged?

Sanity Media began this trend early on! We are the pioneers of unhinged. If you are interested in posting unhinged media, Sanity Media is the place to do it

Feature announcement 🎉

You can now tag your posts! This will make it easier for your content to be discovered, both on Sanity and in search engines - a much-needed SEO boost. You can add up to 5 tags per post and the length limit is 35 characters.

Quick feature announcement

I updated the layout a bit to make it easier to find replies to your posts and comments. This is not backward-compatible yet, so you are only going to see the posts and replies created from now on. I'll run a database migration some time in the next few days so that older replies also appear there.

Is there a secure way to use Redis with Vercel?

I spent a couple of hours yesterday trying to find a way to use Redis with Sanity, which currently runs on Vercel. According to Redis docs on security, it is not a good idea to expose a Redis instance directly to the internet:

Redis is designed to be accessed by trusted clients inside trusted environments. This means that usually it is not a good idea to expose the Redis instance directly to the internet or, in general, to an environment where untrusted clients can directly access the Redis TCP port or UNIX socket.

I wanted to use Digital Ocean's trusted sources to restrict the incoming connections to those coming from my Vercel server but looks like that won't be possible because of Vercel's use of dynamic IP addresses. According to Vercel docs:

To ensure your Vercel deployment is able to access the external resource, you should allow connections from all IP addresses. Typically this can be achieved by entering an IP address of (0.0.0.0).

While allowing connections from all IP addresses may be a concern, relying on IP allowlisting for security is generally ineffective and can lead to poor security practices.

To properly secure your database, we recommend using a randomly generated password, stored as an environment variable, at least 32 characters in length, and to rotate this password on a regular basi...

How I Maintained a Regular Exercise Regime for Over 2 Years

Let me tell you a bit about myself. In my other post, I talked about how I went from being a carb-addicted maniac to eating high-protein foods and thriving from it!

Well, another thing you might not know about me, which is a common trait among all of us humans, is the natural tendency we have to avoid exercise. I read 'Exercised' by Daniel Lieberman, and I really recommend this book to anyone else that hates exercise. I found it really motivating and not at all condescending towards those who did not exercise regularly or didn't like it. The long story short is that exercise was something we basically never evolved to do because it expends precious calories. However, as our society evolved and calories became abundant, we, as humans, never really adapted to this as we are still "evolved" to conserve calories. So, knowing this made me feel a lot less guilty about my exercise-aversion.

What really motivated me to start exercising regularly was having a goal that felt genuinely important and came from within me. During the time that I decided to participate in regular exercise, it was during the pandemic, and I was starting to feel sluggish from the lack of movement while being in lockdown. I also was doing something very difficult and mentally taxing at this time: I was learning a new language. I needed to learn it to at least B2 proficiency, fluent in other words. This was not at all an easy task, as any of you w...