You know how I wrote yesterday that a publication on Medium had syndicated a few of my posts ? After the initial surprise and excitement, reality kind of set in - the posts got read by a few hundred people, and then everything seemed to go quiet. I sat here and imagined a tumbleweed rolling past.
While all of this was going on, I was sitting on a new post - one I had cobbled together out of bits of old posts, and tidied up - with the plan to perhaps post it next weekend - to at least put one post a week on the “sensible blog” (you know - the one where I don’t rant about washing up).
For some reason I thought “oh to hell with it”, and posted it. A little while later, an email arrived from the editor of the publication on Medium that had picked up the other posts - they wanted this one too. I got back on my chair for the second time in twenty four hours, and said that yes - yes, they could have this post too. And then I started breathing again.
The other posts had been seen by about seventy people each, according to the world of statistics that were now flying at me. Within a few minutes the new post overtook both of them, and I have no idea why. I can only guess that the “algorithm” at Medium works in a similar way to the other social behemoths - matching popular content against people following some sort of insanely complex “grand plan”. Or maybe it’s just random ?
Anyway.
As of about ten minutes ago, the post - a nerdy look back at my involvement with Linux over the years - has been seen by roughly twelve thousand people. The numbers are still getting bigger as I write this. That’s a lot of people! One reader took it upon himself to point out a punctuation error. Another pointed out a factual error - I looked him up - he was the co-founder of Wordpress (gulp).
My next stop was Twitter, where people were sharing links to the post, and then Google Analytics - it hadn’t even occurred to me that people would be following the breadcrumbs back to the source of the writing. It’s all a bit mad really.
Of course now I’m resisting the temptation to start writing the next think piece right now. I need to give it a few days, and calm the f*ck down though. Deep breaths.