Slashdot review of Pragmatic Subversion -- The Aftermath

I was pretty surprised when Slashdot accepted my submission, a Pragmatic Version control Subversion book review. I was even more surprised when it hit th front page and for about twelve minutes my name was one of the first things on slashdot!

After this short lapse into geek I logged into my bytemark machine and battened down the hatches. I shut down all unneeded daemons and prepared for the server to go down. The only thing that upset my plans was the absence of the Slashdot Effect.

In total I got the best part of 500 new readers when the article hit and then these dropped down by three hundred or so over the next few days. As my record for unixdaemon.net is over 1700 people in a day this isn’t exactly a worrying amount. With hind-site (and after restarting a couple of daemons) it is pretty logical, the whole review was on slashdot, there wasn’t much of a reason to follow the links back here. Everyone was interested in the review rather than me so the traffic wasn’t going to spike as badly as I thought.

The article itself received a lot of interesting comments (which I’m thankful for) and only a couple of little niggles. One reader picked up a mistake in grammar which I’m annoyed I missed. A second one was curious as to how I had a review copy and was paranoid about any back handers I may have received to write the review. If only I was that predictable! All in all it was a pleasant experience that made the extra time spent on the review worth while. And to everyone who commented on the review; thank you.