Read on Twitter
I'm publishing a blog post today, and I'm going to try livetweeting what the process looks like from my side. I'm hoping this article reaches the front page of HN and /r/programming.
Thread
Thread
I actually was planning to wait until tomorrow to publish since someone posted one of my articles to HN yesterday, and I wanted to leave some space. But I noticed that it's a pretty slow news day on HN. Most of the top 15 posts have <100 points.
It's rare for me to "time" my posts based on HN, but I've had this post queued for a while since I wanted it to come soon after my HN course announcement https://twitter.com/deliberatecoder/status/1333786779929911298
The first thing I do is make a PR into my public repo. I edit in a private repo and push to the public one for the first time on publication day. Looks like I've got merge conflicts. Whoops!
While the build runs, I read the post aloud to myself one final time and tweak things that sound wrong and fix any last errors I find.
I write in VS Code. I use Hugo to generate the site. Its killer feature is fast rendering, so it re-renders and updates the site in place within a few hundred milliseconds as I make changes to the Markdown
Final readthrough is done. Even though this is like my 20th time reading this, I made lots of last-minute tweaks. https://github.com/mtlynch/mtlynch.io/pull/697/commits/67d41a23a11c47924dbeb36bcd831ad9e874d1d9
In the meantime, CircleCI found two markdown lint errors. It turns out I had a stray newline and somehow had a space instead of a trailing period. Stray newline isn't that relevant, but it was valuable to catch the missing period.
I've gone over the post with Grammarly, but I've done some small edits since then. It's not worth starting over with Grammarly because there are way too many false positives, and I don't think there are any loud errors.
Everything is green. Moment of truth! Now, it's time to publish.
The post is now live! https://mtlynch.io/code-review-love/
Next, I submit to Hacker News. I generally wait to do this until after I send the link to my mailing list so that my subscribers see it first, but I'm changing the order since I'm already doing this on Twitter.
I'm taking the unusual step of changing my title for HN, as I think they'll find my original title too silly or clickbaity.
And I make the first comment to show that I'm willing to engage in the thread and interested in feedback. I added an explanation about the title too.
Next stop is /r/programming. I'm using the original title there because I don't think they'll have a problem with it. I make a similar first comment.
To wrap up, I link to those discussion threads from my original post. I have templates in Hugo that automatically generate discuss links based on the post metadata.
And this is the scary period. I try to resist checking upvotes/comments before sending out an email to my newsletter subscribers. But I've spent several months writing this post, and I'm about to find out what the response is from everyone all at once.
Okay, now I've finished composing the letter to my email subscribers. I always struggle with this because I'm trying to write something extra for my subscribers without just re-writing the article. As a sanity check, I re-read and make sure the links go to the right places.
And the email announcement is sent.
Getting a bit meta, after I send out the notice to my email subscribers, I tweet a link to the article.
I consult my post-publish checklist to see if there's anything I'm missing. Done most of it.
This isn't a match for IH, but I can post it to FB so my personal friends can see it.
This isn't a match for IH, but I can post it to FB so my personal friends can see it.
Okay, I'm checking HN for the first time. 6 points. It still has a decent chance at the front page, but it's not *as* much traction as I was hoping for after 46 minutes.
I answered the question just to keep discussion going. I almost always begin comments by thanking the commenter for reading. I think it sets a nice tone and it reminds me to be in a gracious mindset in responding.
It's doing better on reddit. It's on the #4 slot of /r/programming with 12 upvotes and one comment (other than mine).
Back from lunch. Up to 10 points on Hacker News, but I think at the two hour mark, this doesn't have much hope. Fortunately, 10 upvotes is still "promising" for HN. It suggests I might have better luck on a different day.
It seems to be doing well on /r/programming. 70 points and the #2 spot for the subreddit.
A HN commenter made a joke about the post that I very much appreciate
It's now #1 on /r/programming, and the vote count is accelerating, as more people are seeing it
Here's what things look like from Google Analytics
Six hours in, /r/programming response is going strong. 818 upvotes, and still at #1, with many thoughtful comments in the thread.
Hacker News on the other hand, a flop.
But actually a good flop! It got enough upvotes that it looks like there's interest. Not so many upvotes that I'd be blocked from resubmitting later this week.
But actually a good flop! It got enough upvotes that it looks like there's interest. Not so many upvotes that I'd be blocked from resubmitting later this week.
Also, if it's not obvious from the fact that I've been live tweeting constantly, my publication days are consciously self-indulgent.
I plan on not getting much else done because I know I'll be too drawn in to reading comment threads and checking stats.
I plan on not getting much else done because I know I'll be too drawn in to reading comment threads and checking stats.
This is strange. After hovering around 220-240 active users all day, Google Analytics is suddenly showing 570+ active users. Except if you look at "Top Active Pages" the numbers don't add up to anything close to 550.
My reddit post faded down to the #2 slot for /r/programming, but it's my second most successful reddit post ever.
My all-time #1 is still my quitting Google post. At 4,970 upvotes, it's going to be hard to ever beat.
