Fitting the battle of life

This is ridiculous. One little post about a new desktop background in Ubuntu 8.10 and suddenly I’m the fastest growing WordPress.com blog of today? Well, my pageviews are up 50 times on yesterday – nearly a thousand when I last looked – so I guess it kinda makes sense. That’s more views in one day than I’ve had before in an entire month. Good job it’s WordPress.com and not self-hosted.

Today's stats

It’s a pretty big leap, and I think I know vaguely how it happened.

My blog was picked up by paulmellors.net, which got aggregated onto ubuntuweblogs.org. From there, someone at Lifehacker saw it and again linked here.

Today's referrers

I’m guessing 153 people don’t have my RSS feed coming to them – most will probably by Lifehacker, right?

The problem is, I doubt many will be coming back. I don’t have anything else particularly interesting (and the post linked to wasn’t particularly interesting either – just a screenshot of my desktop, and a short comment) on the blog anyway. That’s a thousand people who for one fleeting moment knew this site existed. It’s not even enough to call myself an overnight celebrity.

It does demonstrate the strange nature of the web, though: a link picked up by one person can quickly escalate and turn into a lot of views. This will be the day of views I will never replicate, although I suppose it’s something to aspire to.

I’d better just find something interesting to write that people will come back to.