mary.codes

I wasn't sure if I even wanted to write about this. It feels like I'm bragging by acknowledging it, but it was so exciting that I have to talk about it. Yesterday, I woke up to Monday's article about OSM, Rust, and WASM at the top of Hacker News.

Here's how I found out: I woke up early and started poking around on my phone and scrolling through Hacker News on Glider, which is a fantastic FOSS app for HN that I highly recommend. At that point, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Then, my router decided to stop working for no discernable reason. There's nothing quite like all the smart home outlets going on the blink at 6 AM. One router reboot later and I refresh Glider… and there's the title of my blog post. At that point I think it was third on the page. I went to my Tinylytics page to see how many people had checked out my post and… oh boy.

It's around 6:30 at this point and I found my self suddenly super awake. I was kicking myself because I had removed the demo from that article. It wasn't working right, so I figured I'd get around to fixing it in the next few days and nobody would know. I had some time before work, so I went to fix the demo. By the time I had the demo fixed, the post was at the top of Hacker News.

I don't know what the criteria is to get to the top of HN. I don't actually have an account, I just peek on there sometimes for interesting articles. I assume that the criteria might be traffic-based, because at the time the post had less than 60 upvotes, but thousands of views. (Thank you, fellow lurkers.)

By the end of the day, my site had a little over 20,000 views. Check out how the bars for the past 30 days don't even display anymore, they're so tiny. Y'all blew up my stats.

Putting things into perspective, I know that there are blogs out there that do massive numbers every day. I'm sure that some of the blogs I follow have tens of thousands of page views every day. But this is not something I am used to. Part of me is super excited to be able to share a nerdy interest with thousands of people, and the other part is screaming internally.

You have to understand that I was anticipating hitting 1,000 “lifetime visits” on my blog in the next few days. I switched over from Google Analytics to Tinylytics on December 12th and was nearing 1,000 page views after two and a half months. 30 page visits in a day was a busy day. And I totally understand why. I barely wrote anything in 2023. I'm kind of a hermit. I appreciate that most of my blog’s views come from random Google searches. Before yesterday, my top page was my half-assed attempt to use a Raspberry Pi and radio transmitter to hack my fan. (To follow up on that, the fan’s motor burned out and I replaced it with a WiFi-enabled fan.)

Yesterday was also a busy day at work, so I didn't have a lot of time to pay attention to new followers on Bluesky and Mastodon or comments. By the time I was done with work, I was exhausted and didn't have the energy to respond. So if you're a new follower or reader, thank you and welcome. I write for myself first, so if you're resonating with my ramblings, we must be on the same wavelength. I don't know if anyone has been regularly reading my blog (I haven't been consistent in years, so I don't blame you), but if you have been, I really appreciate it.

If you're looking for an update to the OpenStreetMap post, I'll eventually get around to it. This upcoming weekend I'll be at Orlando Code Camp, so I probably won't have time to work on any of my projects. I'll get to it soon, though.