On the rare occasion I do anything that generates traffic above the background noise of crawlers and spammers (which means, twice a year), I feel the urge to go all meta and point it out.

This retweet of last night’s post was worth a few page views today:

All the traffic isn’t in, and it isn’t on the order of the Indirect Slashdot Effect, but I was fairly surprised at how much cred a StockTwits retweet carries.

And one point of clarification. In that post, my characterization of Brian (@alphatrends) as “chastising” my lack of paying attention was not accurate…I over-dramatized it. He was just expressing angst at someone having gone underwater based on misplaying his analysis (in my case, through lack of attention). Since then, I’ve started watching his market trend videos last week and have learned quite a bit just from watching one, and it’s a great resource for learning. Mea culpa. I typically don’t edit posts for anything other than typos, but I felt it necessary to correct that post.

After a configuration screwup, the archives are back and functional.

Also thought I’d share a little more insight into the indirect Slashdot effect. The echo resulted in:

• Visits from 52 countries (with the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, India and the Netherlands leading the way)
• Visits from 36 states (with California, Texas, Washington, New York and Virginia leading the way)
• Visitors from Microsoft edges out visitors from Oracle, 6-5
• The most popular follow-on article for visitors: The Tuesday Night Football post
• The most popular subsequent search target: my Soul of a New Machine review
• 100-odd comments on the Slashdot story, 36 comments on Richardson’s site, and 2 comments on my own
• Referrals from Richardson’s site outpacing Slashdot referrers just under 4:1
• My first commenter (none other than Susan Lammers herself) posting about her new site which resurrects the original interviews from Programmers at Work.

One other interesting side-effect turned out to be that I hosed a few of my site’s rankings in Google by posting the story; Firebones was not a heavily-used term in the Google index, but because the word appeared in the Slashdot story, lots of scraping and syndication sites that copy slashdot stories have mirrored the story and the keyword all over the place. This resulted in a lot of my previously higher-placed links dropping down. (This was a fairly short-lived effect, and matters little–most people searching for Firebones are looking for something other than this site.)