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Developer gets DZone’d, thinks it an April fools hoax.

Most mornings I make it a habit to do a quick check of Google Analytics in order to view the stats on this blog. I’m usually greeted with somewhere between 25-35 visitors a day sometimes spiking to 50 or more. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw this:

Yikes! No way. Did Google screw up and display somebody else’s stats to me? I know, it’s one of those famed Google April Fools day hoaxes… after all yesterday was April 1st. If it was one of their hoaxes then it’s not very funny, I mean that’s actionable data, Right? (although I doubt any lives where in jeopardy).

The stat that was blown out of the water was a direct link to my last blog post “CoreData’s default date value”, everything else was a tad higher but not by much. So where did all of this traffic come from? Checking out the visitor data it seems to have come from just about everywhere:

Baffled I decided to Google for the title of the blog post which turned up DZone as the first result. Aha, it seems that I have been the unwitting beneficiary of a link submission by bloid (much love). Wow, that’s great and thanks!

So, to all the new readers and feed subscribers, Welcome! I’m a long time Java developer who has turned his sights recently towards Mac development (Cocoa/obj-c). Normally, I tend to focus on Mac software development around here with the occasional foray back to Java, an opinion piece, or a favorite photo from Flickr. Towards the second half of this year I plan to add in lots of content about iPhone development (after Apple opens up the NDA on the beta iPhone SDK). Until then stick around for Mac dev articles and other fun stuff. Happy coding.

Sweet. Looks like the Dutch really took it all in

I listed it on the Cocoa Blogs feed yesterday, too.

Heh. The same thing happened to me recently except on wordpress.com where you can see the stats faster. I was pretty shocked to go from a handful of views to over 800 in one day thanks to an article posted to dzone It was kind of fun.

Thanks Scott! I’ve always admired Cocoa Blogs, Cocoa Dev Central, and of course Theocacao. I’m sure a pretty good amount of that traffic was Cocoa Blogs related too!

Jason: Yea, it’s been a blast. I used to read Java Lobby but stopped ages ago. It was kind of interesting to come full circle with DZone in this way.