Dopeloop hit half a million visitors \o/

Today I was fixing the analytics on dopeloop.ai and I noticed my little music tool has reached half a million visitors over the past year!

It is truly humbling to have half a million people use a piece of software that I wrote.

The success of Melody Generator has convinced me of two things. First, it's possible to rank in search without SEO tricks and without any content at all. Melody Generator is a simple web app with nearly zero content and yet it ranks highly in search for a bunch of keywords. For me that shows that the search engines prioritize for "time on site" most highly of all. If you put an app up that a lot of people linger on, you will rank.

The second thing I learned is you really don't need a big server or a complicated stack. Melody Generator is hosted on a low spec Digital Ocean VPS with about 30 other apps. There is no cluster or separate database server or queues or anything complicated like that. I purposely made the app run almost entirely in the browser client so the compute is offloaded to the user. This architecture works well and I've used it in a handful of different projects now. Of course running full-stack ClojureScript really helps here too, and node.js allows for tremendously efficient back ends.

Anyway, just wanted to share this little success, thanks for reading!