I blogged about curl’s 17th birthday on March 20th 2015. I’ve done similar posts in the past and they normally pass by mostly undetected and hardly discussed. This time, something else happened.

Primarily, the blog post quickly became the single most viewed blog entry I’ve ever written – and I’ve been doing it for many many years. Already in the first day it was up, I counted more than 65,000 views.

The blog post got more comments than on any other blog post I’ve ever done. Right now they have probably stopped but there are 60 of them now, almost everyone one of them saying congratulations and/or thanks.

The posting also got discussed on both hacker news and reddit, totaling in more than 260 comments. Most of those in positive spirit.

The initial tweet I made about my blog post is the most retweeted and stared tweet I’ve ever posted. At least 87 retweets and 49 favorites (it might even grow a bit more over time). Others subsequently also tweeted the link hundreds of times. I got numerous replies and friendly call-outs on twitter saying “congrats” and “thanks” in many variations.

Spontaneously (ie not initiated or requested by me but most probably because of a comment on hacker news), I also suddenly started to get donations from the curl web site’s donation web page (to paypal). Within 24 hours from my post, I had received 35 donations from friendly fans who donated a total sum of  445 USD. A quick count revealed that the total number of donations ever through the history of curl’s lifetime was 43 before this day. In one day we had basically gotten as many as we had gotten the first 17 years.

Interesting data from this donation “race”: I got donations varying from 1 USD (yes one dollar) to 50 USD and the average donation was then 12.7 USD.

Let me end this summary by thanking everyone who in various ways made the curl birthday extra fun by being nice and friendly and some even donating some of their hard earned money. I am honestly touched by the attention and all the warmth and positiveness. Thank you for proving internet comments can be this good!