Creating long-lasting content on Observable

I am 100% convinced Observable is the right way to share computational thought. Sometimes though, it feels like notebooks are only read once during their birth on the page. However, I am happy to report you can create long-lasting content with lots of repeat visitors and it is surprisingly straightforward to do. In this article, I will share what I have learned on my Observable journey.

I took a data-driven approach to find out what works. After wiring my pages to Plausible Analytics I could finally get a birds-eye view of my readership. I found the results fascinating! Here are my page views in the last month (Nov. 2021):-

Collaborate and solve a platform need

My #1 content by a long shot is Composing viewofs with the view literal. This is a super useful utility that helps create complex UIs on the Observablehq platform. It fills a gap in the platform primitives, and clearly, I was not the only one who needed it. I collaborated with @mootari and @mbostock on it, and it was developed to support a consulting job that needed a production-level UI.

Now, I have written many libraries for Observable. None of them do as well as this one. I think this one resonated so much harder because it was the product of a business need, and it was refined via conversations with others…