Whoa, that’s pageviews.
All the way. Double pageviews.
Oh my God. It’s double pageviews all the way.
Whoa, that’s so intense.
Whoa, man. Wow. Whoa-ho-ho.
Oh my God. Wow. Yeah.

Look at that.
It’s starting to even look like triple pageviews.
Oh my God. It’s double pageviews all across the graph.
What does this mean?

It’s so beautiful. *weeping*

On 11/11/11 11:11:11 I started this blog which I called 1+1=1. It’s idea is to celebrate imagination and serve as my brain dump. Many people ask me why 1+1=1. The explanation is below.

The first articles were focused on imagination: how it works, how to get brilliant ideas using it and then just do it. I truly believe imagination is the greatest resource we, humans, have, next to time. I got several ‘nice read’ comments from friends and that meant a bunch to me. Woohoo, there was someone out there reading it.

Then I wrote an article about the reasons you must install Sublime Text 2. I use it extensively (for work mostly writing PHP, for my side project mostly writing JavaScript and for my blog mostly writing gibberish) and I had to share the love.

Hacker-News effect

So what happened? I posted the article on Hacker News at 4pm UTC following the advice from this post: “Whats the best time to post to HackerNews”. In the first 30 minutes the article got several up-votes and comments, when suddenly they started growing faster - it made it on the frontpage. I was excited. The post stayed on the frontpage for about 30 minutes. In the evening I couldn’t follow up the blog because I had a Christmas party to attend, but when I came home early in the morning I sat in front of my computer to find out that I’ve made 3,274 pageviews that day. Woohoo again!

What are the reasons that the post got any vote-ups and comments? I believe there are 4 reasons:

1. Number in the title
The title was “9 reasons you must install Sublime Text 2. Code like a man, man.” When you see the digit 9 and the word ‘nine’, which one do you understand and assimilate faster? Digits work better - they are shorter, so faster to read. When you scan through a page in most of the cases digits catch your attention because we process them immediately.

2. Scandalous statement in the title
“Code like a man, man.” That was unplanned, I promise. It was a reference to the hilarious OldSpice commercial which states - “Smell like a man, man.” Nevertheless, some people called it sexist. However, this resulted in more comments because if people were not interested in the article itself they wanted to talk about the “sexist” title.

3. Entertaining intro
There is a lot of information on the internet, a lot. It’s impossible to read everything, and therefore readers pay less attention and time for reading every single piece of news. I tried to attract readers by making the article’s intro engaging and entertaining Sublime-Text-2 version of the OldSpice commercial. I believe the intro is the crucial point when the reader decides whether to read on or leave.

4. Written with passion
It’s mentioned last, but it’s the most important one. I wrote about Sublime Text 2 because it fascinates me. I believe when you write with passion, you find people who think likewise.

Paul-Irish effect

The day after publishing my post the pageviews naturally went down. However, on the next morning, I opened Google Analytics and I was surprised. More than 60 people were reading the blog at that very moment. What was going on? I checked the top referrals and found out most of the visitors come from Google+. I thought to myself “Hm, I didn’t post it there.” I surfed to Google+, pasted the URL of the blog post in the search bar and what do I see? Paul Irish had shared it. I smiled.

There was a constant flow of visitors all morning and afternoon. Then in the evening Paul Irish tweeted that his “G+ stream has been lighting up” which resulted in even more visitors and even more people started tweeting the link. The pageviews got up to 4,298 for that day only. Woohoo once again.

What are the reasons Paul Irish posted the link on his Google+ stream? I believe there is 1 very important reason.

It’s all about moving the web forward. Linters are amazingly useful code quality tools, they make you write better code. JSHint and JSLint are awesome. JSHint integrated in your Sublime Text 2 editor is even better. If everyone is on the same page when writing code, the web will move forward in a faster pace.

Conclusion

Hacker News, Twitter and Google+ are all great platforms for discovering useful information and getting discovered, use them wisely. If you have something interesting to say, don’t wait another instance, just do it. Sharing is caring!