Plurrrr

First Page on Hacker News

Yesterday I managed to get on the first page of Hacker News with a link to tumblelog on GitHub: Show HN: Static blog generator in about 1 KLOC. In the past I had submitted tumblelog more than once but didn't get much upvotes, sometimes none at all. But the magic word KLOC (kilo lines of code) and maybe the submission time did the trick.

I did manage to get on position 17 on the front page. At least that's what I know. So what has been the effect of this? At the time of writing according to GitHub:

• 1,755 Unique visitors.
• Three clones.
• Number of stars went from 49 to 68.

The number of visitors I have is normally a few a day, so the effect was very significant on the number of visitors. I am very happy with the increase in the number of stars, thanks everyone who voted!

I hope that this will result in people using tumblelog for their blog. And hopefully also some feedback.

• tumblelog

The Emacs Problem

Charles G. pointed out in an email discussion recently:

Lisp still doesn't seem like the right language for doing text manipulation, and nothing I've seen from the Emacs libraries is making me think any differently. It sure beats the hell out of Java though. Maybe someday someone will write Emacs using Ruby as the embedded interpreter...

These are all great points. I know exactly how he feels. I know soooo exactly how Charles feels that I decided to write a blog instead of an email reply. Because all the things he's brought up are real, bona-fide problems.

Source: The Emacs Problem, an article by Steve Yegge.

• emacs