Last night, my sarcastic post on the new MacBook Pro was posted as this thread on Hacker News. It generated some good comments and got modestly upvoted. So far I am approaching 12000 requests on that one article in the last 8 hours.
Some observations:
- The original poster apparently didn't realize my screed was supposed to be a Swiftian attack on the whinging that followed the MacBook Pros announcement. I am not sure if that makes my attempt at satire a failure or a tremendous success. It amuses me either way.
- My server held up well. Props to Digital Ocean for a great (and well-priced) product.
- Part of the philosophy behind sheep.horse was to keep things simple - plain files rather than a database backend. That seems to have paid off, I can live with a 8% CPU spikeI have plans for the other 92%.
- A surprising percentage of requests come from Facebook. There are at least 2 bots that just repost Hacker News articles to Facebook and I guess a lot of people follow those instead of reading Hacker News directly. This saddens me, Facebook already has too much of the Internet bound up in its sticky claws.
- Judging from the logs, very few people stay to read anything else on my site. Perhaps I need to punch up my writing, but it is more likely nobody cares about my half-baked book reviews.
I maintain this blog for my own purposes but it is fun to be noticed once in a while. The rush of visitors is trailing off pretty quickly, it's back to anonymity for me.