I was surprised by the power of the tubes again this week. I haven't spent much effort on blogging recently, and frankly there hasn't been much traffic here. But I have been researching Open Source web development frameworks for one that suited my personal tastes. I really, really like what I've seen in Rails (particularly the community) and understand its popularity. I do have some differences of opinion regarding the design of the Ruby language. Having a strong opinion is ok, but in retrospect I regret starting a language flame war.
When I wrote "Rails is written in the wrong language" nearly a month ago, I was getting frustrated with the lack of boiler plate authentication code for Pylons, and had serious Rails envy, and wrote the entry in an off the cuff ranty style. It generated almost no response, as I suspected because most of my readers had packed up and left for higher ground.
Hitting the front page of reddit when you have almost no organic traffic is like getting in a Bugatti Veyron, hitting the gas hard to 100mph and then slamming on the brakes to 0, which in the Bugatti takes less than 10 seconds.
There is one periodic reader here with 21000 reddit karma points. One link is all it takes.
In the ensuing flame war my original point - Ruby is TIMTOWDI, but that isn't DHH philosophy for Rails - was buried in Ruby vs Python rants. I really should have learned my lesson by now, but sometimes my opinions get the best of me. But the sad truth is, if I had written it in a less confrontational style, more than likely it wouldn't have received the same interest. Controversy sells more than ever.
By the way, Baus' law, "The popularity of a blog entry is inversly proportional to the effort used in creating it" is still in effect.