One of the many things that makes writing a blog exciting is when a post goes viral for an entirely unexpected reason — and what happened on Tuesday of this week was very unexpected! While making a routine check of my stats page shortly after 4:00 PM, I noticed, with a degree of astonishment, that the day’s traffic counter looked like this:
Um, wow: I couldn’t believe that the blog needed fewer than 100 visits to surpass its best traffic day ever (which, I will note, was several years in the past at this point)! I immediately checked my list of referrers (sites that are directing traffic to Worleygig) and noted that a huge amount of traffic was coming from this Reddit thread, which indirectly linked to This Post (from way back in 2011!) about a Pink Pig Chair. Yes I just typed that. Check it out for yourself below.
It seems that the owner of this chair put it up for sale on Craigslist, which triggered the viral activity as the post was picked up by Reddit and then Twitter, and funneled over to me because of a completely incidental link to my post buried in the discussion. To add intrigue, a reporter from the New York Times also contacted me for a story she was researching about the Craiglist post! You can’t make this stuff up.
At the end the day, we celebrated a record high number of visits to our humble little site. Even though the extra traffic will gradually dissipate until we are back to our normal flow, I am super grateful to the Internet gods that crazy things like this can occur.
