Facts
So the other day I had an hour to waste, I decided to learn how to use MooTools classes and, as the best way to learn something is to play with it, I played with it.
About 30 minutes after, I had something running. Dirty and buggy but still, looking cool. It took me an extra 30 minutes to clean that up, make sure it was working on most browsers, add the Google Analytics tracker, push it online and add it to the projects page…
You probably guessed it already, I’m talking about the Scroll Clock. Well this hour might be the least wasted one of my life. Think I’m radical? Read on!
Results
After tweeting about it twice (once to someone who’s interested in netart, and once to the MooTools team) things went big. I don’t know exactly how this happened but it (the Scroll Clock page) got love from Gizmodo, swissmiss, QBN, Ajaxian, Neatorama and many more. Wow.
A few days after the tsunami, here’s what my Analytics page looks like. My daily average of 600 page views has seriously been put to shame, with a climax on the 19th of November: 313,000+.
Side effects
This is probably the funniest part, not only did I worry for the server the site is hosted on, but a few things happened…
I got 3 job offers ; many friend requests on Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo and so on ; received a donation ; was contacted by a Google guy to add the project to chromeexperiments.com, which I did ; and of course had to bother my friends and colleagues about my new web-fame…
Conclusion
The short one: don’t spit on Twitter, it might make you a star. Just joking, keep spitting on it.
The long one: the simplest and shortest project of mine is the one which received the most visitors and love, ironic right? What does that mean? Should I stop working on full-fledged AIR apps?
Prove me wrong!