Spilling Cocoa – The First Week

The first week and a bit, actually, but who’s counting? It’s a day or two over a month since I registered the www.spillingcocoa.com domain and it’s all going a whole load better than I’d ever imagined. For one thing, I’d only anticipated having enough material to publish a poem a week, but it soon became clear that a poem a day was not only going to be possible but also necessary in order to get through all the wonderful stuff I was being sent.

Not only that, but people are reading the poems. Rating them. Sharing them. Subscribing. Take a look at this usage statistics graph:

I won’t divulge the scale used (yet – although let’s just say that the traffic is a LOT higher than I get here), but what the shape of it means is that, following the inevitable initial burst of activity, we seem to have settled down to a remarkably consistent traffic profile. I’d half-expected interest to drop off, but it doesn’t seem to have done so quite yet.

This, of course, is mostly down to the excellent quality of the submissions, and the good news is there’s plenty more to come. But please don’t be afraid to submit – as I hope you can see, we have a pretty broad definition of what constitutes humour.

The oddest thing that happened in the last week was finding out that we had a Duotrope listing a mere two days after going live. I had no idea they were so proactive. Quite a scary moment in some ways, though, because at that moment it suddenly seemed that this was something real and rather public. It is of course entirely possible that at some point in the future, in the middle of some horrendous scandal, I may look back on this time and wonder how it all seemed so innocent. Let’s hope not, though, eh?