Tutorial aftermath (and another one!)

07 March 2006 @ 08:42 in Tutorials
Until last week, this site got an average of 25 page impressions a day. On February 7, I got a little spike thanks to Jim Coudal linking to the bread-on-Tim's-desk picture; that day saw Receding Hairline garner 443 hits. On February 16, I submitted the site to Realmac Software's Site Showcase, as I use its software to build the site. The next ten days brought a total of 2037 page impressions, averaging at 185 a day. I was delighted; thanks, Dan! Then I put together my little tutorial on the fake tilt-shift effect, and, thinking it was right up their street, submitted it to Boing Boing. Look what happened:

Page impressions, February 2006

chart

To be clear: on February 27, Receding Hairline was viewed 13,681 times. The next day, 22,112 page impressions; that's almost a thousand-fold increase. Things have quietened down a little now, but so far in March, I'm still seeing a page impression average of well over six thousand. In the last week, I've had almost 75,000 page impressions. I am agog. Um, hi, everyone.

And what an overwhelmingly positive experience it has been. I've had emails from people all over the world telling me how much they appreciate the tutorial, and how fun it is. The co-creator of the cult Mac game Myst, Robyn Miller, picked up on the technique, I had a few emails from Microsoft's Virtual Earth Program Manager, people are using it on stills from games, and a Flickr group on tilt-shift which had, I think, fewer than a dozen photos in it before I posted my tutorial, now has almost 900. At its height, the tutorial was the third most popular link overall on del.icio.us, and, much to my amusement, I'm still getting a lot of Swedish readers thanks to IDG.se (the Swedish website of MacUser's main competitor publishing house) posting my tutorial on its front page. Scott Kelby linked to it too; oh, the irony.

So... a huge thank you to everyone who has linked to the tutorial, and everyone who visited. In celebration and as a thank you, I've put up the second Receding Hairline tutorial. It's not as fun as the first – and in all honesty is here mostly so I can point people to it to save me explaining the same thing over and over again – but it is useful. If you have a Mac, you really should bookmark my guide to basic Mac troubleshooting.

Two final notes. Some people have asked me if there's a way to show their appreciation for the tilt-shift tutorial, so I've placed a donate via PayPal button on the tutorial page. This is fast, secure, and can handle payments from all major credit cards.

Lastly, I need to make it clear that this will remain primarily my personal site; I'll post tutorials when I have a good idea, but most of the time, Receding Hairline's primary function is as my blog. It's a place for me to tinker and to vent. You're all very welcome to stick around for that, but it's unlikely to be pretty or useful; it may, if we're all very lucky, be entertaining.

Thank you, and goodnight.