Third Time on the Front Page of Hacker News
A reflection on how three of my blog articles made it to the front page of Hacker News.
Hacker News is a website I visit a few times a day for years. It is a reliable news source for me where usually tech news breaks first. Everything from new products, features, security hacks, and everything in between.
According to my Hacker News profile vegasbrianc, I first created my profile back in 2008. I have submitted a few articles here and there but nothing consistently. Also, my upvoting tends to be something I know or tried and like. Additionally, I am usually too busy to troll the comments and typically keep skimming the headlines.
I started this week with a mission of writing an article a day for two weeks. I've neglected my blog for a few months, and I want to get back into the writing rhythm. Now, I don't want to produce boring content, but articles people would be interested in and interests me. Just so happens, my third article this week went viral while getting back into writing. Wow!
Making it to the front page of Hacker News has a similar effect as the Slashdot effect where a big rush of unexpected web traffic appears overwhelming your infrastructure, typically taking the website offline. Luckily in today's world, this happens less frequently.
My 3 Front Page Articles
- How to Monitor Airplane Traffic with a Raspberry Pi (614 words)
- How a single Raspberry Pi made my Home Network Faster (831 words)
- Docker Official Images are Moving to Alpine Linux (400 words)
So what is so special about these particular articles that they made it to the front page of Hacker News? I honestly don't see a real reason why one article would make it and others not.
Observations
- I submitted the two How-to articles, and an HN member-submitted the other one
- "How to" and Raspberry articles seem to be a hot topic
- Average of 615 words per article
Here's a link to my open analytics for you to have a look for yourself - SimpleAnalytics
Recommendations
The only thing I can suggest is getting in a writing habit, writing about topics you are passionate about, and not being afraid to promote your work.
I wrote an article, the 5 Tips to Blog Smarter, on some of the practices I use when writing blog posts.
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