About a week ago, I posted about equals signs in some documents, and that totes went viral, so I thought I’d talk some about that? For no good reason, really — do you need a reason to do navel gazing? Do you?
The first day, the traffic was dominated by readers originating from Hacker News. Then all of a sudden, there was a huge influx of traffic from Twitter. But whyyyy!
It was because of this tweet that got community noted, I think:
It did the numbers, anyway… Somehow this (along with repostings of the original tweet) led people to my account:
*gulp* 600K views! And I don’t even have a blue check! Do you think if I sign up quickly, and then ask Elon to add the views, then I’ll get lots of $$$? No? Darn.
I guess in this situation the traditional thing to do is to post a reply going “wow this blew up listen to my podcast”, but I don’t really have a podcast, and besides, I like using commas too much.
And I looked at all these “… and 100 others followed you” and didn’t understand that that, er, rolled over or something? So I didn’t check my profile until days later, and:
*gulp* I had no idea that so many people were interested in email transport standards! That’s an increase of, er, 20,000% or something. And they’re all going to be really disappointed when they get tweets about obscure 80s comics in their feed all of a sudden. I apologise in advance!
To make it up to these people, perhaps I can talk about RFC2231: “MIME Parameter Value and Encoded Word Extensions: Character Sets, Languages, and Continuations”. To the best of my knowledge, I was the only person who actually implemented this standard, so if you use it in your email, people who don’t use Gnus won’t be able to decode certain headers at all.
Look how pretty it is:
(rfc2231-encode-string "foo" "These are röck döts") => "foo*=utf-8''These%20are%20r%c3%b6ck%20d%c3%b6ts"
OK, perhaps there’s a reason it didn’t take off…
But that’s it! From now on there’ll be no more posts about email encoding! You’ll have to get your fix of that elsewhere!
But what you’re all wondering — were there any funny replies? Eh, some, but I liked this best:
Euhm, it’s really not, but other than that: A brilliant tweet.
And I think they should invite me to the influencer awards next year; the appropriately named “Vixen Awards”. There must be justice in this world!
After that, there was another bump originating on Youtube, but now it’s calmed down…
Oh, and I got a request to publish a translation of the post in a Norwegian magazine. So I translated it to Norwegian. The hardest thing to translate was “rock döts”. We workshopped the translation quickly on irc and landed on “röcktödlar”…
… which is a word the world has never seen before! I’m shocked!
The magazine doesn’t seem to have published it, though? Oh well, the vagaries of publishing…
And… that’s enough blathering from me about his extremely important subject. I’ve got comics to read.