Be warned, this article is not for everyone. According to Hashnode it is a 33-minute read article but in case you follow some of the links it will definitely take more than an hour. 😊
To help you I wrote the most important information in bold , so you can quickly skim through the article and come back later if you do not have time now.
I have to tell you, it was a pretty busy month , so that is why this article is so long. Usually, I love long posts, but this one is a little bit too long even for me(7215 words to be concrete). I hope I can get the longest Hashnode article badge, even if there is no such badge at the moment. 😊
The Backstory
On the 6th of December 2022, I started working at my new company DMG MORI HEITEC Digital Kft as a Senior (Full Stack 😊) Software Engineer in Test.
It didn't take too much time and I fell in love with the team the tasks and the company. My friend and former colleague István invited me into his team. I really loved working together with him , but despite this, he needed months to convince me to visit them for an interview. In the end, I went there and got an offer the next day which I accepted.
The other team members are really cool guys and girls, I am happy to work in such a great team.
The tasks are varying I had the opportunity to learn Selenide and Karate DSL and I will learn Gatling in the near future. There is a lot of opportunity for improvement.
My First Article
After a few weeks, István told me it would be great if I could write some articles. Being an introvert I did not really like the idea , but after 1-2 weeks I was sitting at home in front of my computer on a Sunday afternoon and I started to feel I want to write an article about Selenide, to share with the world how awesome it is.
I needed several days multiple iterations to finish the article and I also asked for feedback from my colleagues and I improved further my writing based on that.
Although you can never finish an article, I felt it good enough to post it finally, so on January 26, 2022, I posted my first technical article on LinkedIn.
A few hours after posting I already got the advice to find a platform dedicated to software developers and post there as I can reach more relevant people and eventually my articles could be featured there. I got the advice to check dev.to, Hashnode and Medium.
I have examined all of them and decided to give Hashnode a try. One of the main reasons was that I could have my own domain which is not just very cool but also makes sure the traffic lands on my webpage, not on a blogging platform and I also read Hashnode excels in SEO too.
After setting up the account, I copied my Selecting an End to End Testing Framework - Selenium or Selenide? article from LinkedIn and I posted it here on Hashnode on the very same day under my own domain mszeles.com. And that is where my Hashnode journey begins.
Know your audience
I wanted to learn more about my audience so I integrated Google Analytics , which was quite an easy ride with Hashnode as I only had to copy the Google Analytics Tracking ID on the Integrations settings page.
It can be very addictive to track how many readers are browsing your pages at the moment , from which country, which pages they are checking and so on.
According to my opinion, the most important information (in addition to the visitor count) that you can get from Google Analytics is the bounce rate and the average session duration. The first one tells how much percentage of your users left your page without any interaction and the average session duration tells how many minutes the readers spent on your page on average. From this data and from the other features you can gain a very good picture of your audience, I will write about it more in detail in an upcoming article.
Monetizaton Attempt #1
In the long run, I would like to earn enough money from (technical) writing to not depend on my daily job. Not because I want to give up my current job, as I really love software development, but because I would like to have a better balance between family time, writing and software development. So to make the first step, I registered an uphold account and connected it to Hashnode. Up till now, I received 0 money from it. Ok, this is not completely true, as I received 0.95BAT, but that came from my colleague Bence Hornyák so that does not count. It is only my first month so I do not yearn too much about it. 😊
Introduction
After a few days, I decided to post an introduction so people can learn why I am here and what can they expect from me. That was the birth of Hello Hashnode Community - I am Miki Szeles from Hungary.
I won't repeat the article here, but to quickly summarize, I am here for 3 reasons :
- Learn from you
- Share my knowledge
- Entertain you
This was the time when I used another cool feature of Hashnode, which is offering to share my articles on multiple sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. At that time I was not an active Twitter user (which changed in a few days after I understood how amazing Twitter is) but I definitely wanted to post on LinkedIn, so I did it.
Test Automation And Software Development
I had a big plan. I wanted to post consistently, so I decided to publish an article biweekly. Well, I have to tell you, the plan did not go as expected. 😊
My plan was to post in the field where I am an expert which is test automation and software development so I continued my posting by the Selenide, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship article.
I count as an early adopter here on Hashnode in the field of test automation. There is very little content here compared to Medium. There are no tags like Test automation (only automation which is much broader), Selenide, Karate DSL so I created a feature request which is already in progress since weeks. 😊
Being an early adopter has its pros and cons. It is a great opportunity to become the expert on the platform in the long run, but it is tough, as you have a very narrow audience. I am fine with this, especially as I also started to repost my Hashnode articles on medium.com.
And now let's get back to the original story.
It took a few days that I get to know my article Selecting an End to End Testing Framework - Selenium or Selenide? has been featured in Software Testing Weekly Issue 109 which is a testing newsletter read by more than 4000 test professionals. I was astonished I did not expect such a thing at all. In the upcoming 5 weeks 4 of my other Hashnode articles Save dozens of minutes daily during writing Selenide and Selenium E2E automated tests using the Selenideium Element Inspector Chrome Extension!, How Google Tests Software - What we can learn from Google? - A book extract By Miki Szeles and Selecting a Load And Performance Testing Framework — Gatling vs. Grafana k6 which means 4 featured articles in 5 weeks. Quite a good start I would say. 😊
Hashnode's Greatest Value #1 - Reading
As days passed, I quickly realized there is much more value on Hashnode than just writing. Actually, the real value comes from reading.
In the beginning, I looked only at the Relevant and Featured sections but I quickly learned I need more. Much much more, so I started browsing the Recent section of the Hashnode app. That was a huge mistake. 😊
I got totally addicted to Hashnode's Recent feed. I read it when I get up, while I am travelling, smoking, waiting before I fall asleep and sometimes even on the toilet. 😊
I literally read every blog post title , except sometimes when the app stucks at loading new posts, but I already created a bug report about it, so I hope it will be fixed soon.
By checking all the titles (now you can understand how important it is to choose the right title and also add an image which really worth a thousand words😊) I can narrow down the articles into 3 categories**.
- Interesting posts closely related to my current knowledge
- Interesting posts not closely related to my current knowledge
- Articles which I am not interested in at the moment
You might be surprised, but I see the greatest value in point 2. During the 4 decades of my life, I learnt many different things: software/web/app development, testing, poker, go game, building stuff with Arduino, photography, being a barista, memorization and productivity methods, writing, webshop building with WordPress, self-branding, community building and much more. Most of these fields seem quite unrelated , but I am always looking for ways to connect them and as I am looking for it, I usually find it. 😊
Just to mention 2 examples :
Water Droplet Photography
Photography and software development are the closest topics to my heart , so I found a project with which I could combine them. I built a valve system with which I can collide water droplets. Colliding the droplets is one thing, but it is quite a big challenge to freeze the moment as the currently available commercial cameras cannot take the pictures fast enough. So the solution for this was to use a very low power strobe flashing which takes ~1/50000sec to freeze the moment. There is only one problem with it, you have to do this in complete darkness. 😱
I won't waste more time on this topic, but let me know if you are interested in it, so I could write an article about it. To help you better imagine what they look like I leave here 2 of my pictures.
A bottle of water
Parrot
No. It is not Photoshop. All of them are real-world water droplet collisions. 😊
You can check my other pics on my Facebook Page. Which is your favourite photo? Share it in the comments section. 😊
Marketing and Self-branding
After creating the water droplet photographs I had the opportunity to show them at 2 exhibitions. My first ever exhibition took place at the Keg Beer house. This was amazing, I invited my former teacher Dóra Velican-Patrus to open the exhibition. Almost all of my friends were there. We had great beers and conversations.
I had 3 months to prepare for the exhibition. Prepare for what, you might ask. Let me shed some light on it.
As I got lots of positive feedback I decided to start selling my images on canvas. In order to do that I decided to create a webshop for my pictures. I could have used a webshop platform, but I like those options more with which I can improve, so I decided to learn WordPress and create my own site in 3 months.
I was super enthusiastic so enrolled in a Wordpress course called WPKurzus where I learnt a lot about WordPress development and got help whenever I got stuck.
In 2 months I was ready with my own full-fledges webshop with integrated credit card payment, GDPR and everything else. Unfortunately, since then I took off the website, so I cannot show it to you.
I even created nameplates for all my photos, with QR codes pointing to the individual images in my shop. Well, the outcome was quite disappointing as almost no one used the QR codes.
Despite this, I did not regret my choice. I learnt a lot about how easy it is to create a full-fledged webshop with WordPress, how to arrange an exhibition (one tip: you have to put the most exciting picture in front of the entrance door 😊) and I also learnt I need much more knowledge in the field of marketing and self-branding.
Three months later I got the opportunity to have another exhibition in the MoM Cultural Center. It was planned that one of my friends Tamás Dombora Tóth will have an exhibition , but he had an ongoing exhibition at that time so he could not bring his pictures and he asked me whether I would be interested in this or not. I said yes of course, so I sent my pictures as a reference to the organizers and they happily invited me to showcase my images there. I highly recommend checking Tamás's photos, they are just amazing : Facebook, Instagram.
I decided be better prepared this time, so I took a course on Instagram marketing and also started to work together with a marketing consultant. It was not cheap, but I learnt so much I will never regret this decision.
At that time, I also joined a self-branding community called BrandBirds. Joining this group was one of the best decisions in my life. The group was consisting of the mentor Róbert Mészáros and a few dozens of small entrepreneurs.
The community was amazing, we met personally regularly where we shared our knowledge, troubles and helped each other where we could. We even had MasterMind groups in which we tried to help one person with their current stalling based on our own experience.
I learnt so much about self-branding which I used at this time to build up the brand Miki Szeles as a photographer.
Life has changed and I completely gave up photography for years. I am currently rediscovering it with my Yashica Mat 124g hundred years old Japanese analogue camera. Here is one of my photos taken by that camera: 😊
Be unique and personal
Sorry for the long background story. I promise I won't do that again (except I do). 😊
So we are here at the present, just a few weeks after I started blogging here on Hashnode. At the moment I am trying to use all the essence that I have learnt in the past.
The most important thing I learnt: Be unique and personal. Make people interested in you, not in your articles. By personalizing your blog, sharing personal stories, and showing a sense of humour, you can emerge from the many other bloggers. People love when they get more than just pure technical stuff.
Here is my cover illustration which was created by my cousin Anna Tóth:
You can check her other works on her website and also on Instagram.
In case you would like to have an outstanding cover illustration, do not hesitate to contact her: anna.toth.ou@gmail.com
Hashnode's Greatest Value #2 - Hidden Gems
Back to where we left off, I mostly value interesting posts not closely related to my current knowledge. This is how I found an awesome article from Rajiv Verma about how you can create your very own Chrome extension in 15 minutes , which inspired me to develop Selenideium Element Inspector with which test automation teams can save hours of works daily, by automatically generating all relevant selectors for Selenide, Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, TestCafe and Squish end to end testing frameworks.
I developed the first version of this plugin is only 3 hours. Without Rajiv's article I would have never ever thought about developing my own plugin. Thank you very much, Rajiv. I develop the plugin as an open-source project, with a step-by-step guide on how to develop your own plugin , so in case you are interested just read my article Save dozens of minutes daily during writing Selenide and Selenium E2E automated tests using the Selenideium Element Inspector Chrome Extension! here on Hashnode.
Just a few days ago I found another hidden gem here on Hashnode. It was writing from naveenkumar j in which he introduced a website with which you can generate your awesome looking GitHub profile. Here is mine: 
In case you would like to have your own awesome Github profile just read Naveenkumar's article or read my How to Create a Legendary GitHub Profile? post.
Unfortunately, such treasures get lost here on Hashnode as in case it is not from someone whom you are following or it is not featured, nobody else will see it. Except me. But I am crazy. 😊
By the way does anyone know what is needed if you want your article featured on Hashnode?
Hashnode Weekly by Miki Szeles
In order to solve the above-mentioned problem, I started Hashnode weekly which is a list of Hashnode articles curated by myself. I bring articles from all of my favourite topics like software development, testing, self-improvement, productivity, psychology and more. It is not just an aggregation as I write a few sentences about all linked articles, so you can decide whether you would like to read it or not.
I dedicate a separate section for newcomers as it is very tough to grow your audience as a beginner and I always have some kind words for the newcomers and I advise you to do the same.
Starting blogging is not an easy step to make, so I started a series in which I will share my advice regarding why you should start writing, how you should write, where and how to publish and also advanced writing tips and SEO topics will be covered in the upcoming posts. Up till now I only posted the first one from the series: Start writing now! Seriously!
In this few weeks I read around 200 Hashnode articles from which I already created 3 weekly lists : Hashnode Weekly 001 by Miki SzelesHashnode Weekly 002 by Miki Szeles.Hashnode Weekly 003 by Miki Szeles.
Monetization Attempt #2
In order to take another step towards monetization, I registered on Buy me a coffee which is similar to Uphold and I include a link at the bottom of all my articles, to give another chance to support me. Up till now I have not been supported by anyone, but all is not lost that is delayed. 😊
You can easily integrate Buy me a coffee into your posts, just check the source of this post and copy-paste the relevant link web element into your article.
Do not forget to replace my username with yours, otherwise I will get the money instead of you. 😊
Hashnode's Greatest Value #3 - Community
There are a lot of great bloggers here on Hashnode, but you lose a lot of value and potential opportunity in case you are interacting with them in a read-only mode.
It took some courage but after a few days, I started not just to read but also to comment on articles. Based on my prior experience I can tell how uplifting it is if someone comments on your post. Even if it is a simple thank you, it can make my day.
There are 3 types of comments I post
Thanks for your article
In case I find anything useful or inspiring the bare minimum what I do is to say thanks for the post. I advise to you to do the same. With such a simple act, you can brighten the day of a fellow blogger. 😊
Questions
Whenever I read something, many questions pop into my mind. I could use Google to try to search for an answer but it is much more efficient to ask the expert. As somebody willing to share his/her knowledge with the community I am pretty sure she/he will be eager to help you out.
Sharing My Experience
In case I have related knowledge to the topic I always try to share those in my comments. It can be valuable for the writer and also for others who read the post. In case I already wrote about the topic on my blog, I also share the link to my article.
Unfortunatelly at the moment there is a bug cause of which links do not appear in comments , so I created a bug report. Please upvote it in case you would like post links in comment section. 👍
During these few weeks, I already learned a lot not just from the original articles but also from the answers I got for my comments.
By the way. Did you know that there are 10 different emoticons you can use for a post? In case I read something insightful I use all of them and I advise you to do the same. 😊
Writing Challenges
I love gamification. I even took a course about it on Coursera several years ago. I highly recommend taking that course. The main reason is not to do your own gamification (of course you can do that too), but to understand better the world surrounding us. Since taking the course I realized we are living in a gamified world. It is in everything not just in games anymore.
Just to mention a few examples
- We are earning points at Tesco, Aldi, Walmart, Lidl, MOL, Agip, Lukoil,... with your client cards to get some discounts in exchange to that we share all our buying habits with the companies
- We are using Starbuck's Reward app to earn rewards
- The school system is also gamified, as you do things to earn points/grades, you have leaderboards from which the top gets scholarships
- We are posting on social media to earn likes and kudos
- All the running, fitness and diet apps are using gamification to keep up your motivation
- Merit Badges awarded by the Girls Scouts or Boy Scouts
- Airlines' Frequent Flyer Programs
- 9Gag displays a toast with the length of your daily login streaks every first login on the day. There were days when the only reason for opening 9gag was to not break my streak
- Khan Academy makes people fall in love with learning through Gamified Online Education
- The puzzle game FoldIt uses gamification to get people into solving real-world problems from the field of biology
- Jane McGonigal's SuperBetter program which helps you recover from setbacks
- Memrise and Duolingo apps are also using gamification to motivate you
- AccorHotels Loyalty Program with which you can earn points and badges that can be redeemed for free hotel reservations
- I also recently found out that daily.dev also uses gamification to motivate the content creators.
And I left a very sad example to the end : In China, your whole life is "gamified" as based on your acts, travels, connections you get scores which determines what you are allowed to do and what you are not.
There is a very important thing you have to be aware of about Gamification.
Gamification is just a toolset that is not good or evil in itself. But this toolset can be used for both good and evil things too.
After this introduction let's get back to Hashnode gamification.
At the moment there are 6 Hashnode challenges :
Self Starter
This one speaks for itself, it is very easy to achieve. Just publish your first post.
Word Warrior
In order to achieve this, you have to write a more than 2000 words post here on Hashnode. It might seem scary, but it is not that hard to come up with such a long article.
Fun fact : Up till now you read 4034 words in this article. 😊
I've earned Word Warrior Badge quite quickly but I couldn't find out which of my posts as I have not found it in my notifications and also not amongst my emails.
#2Articles1Week
I already saw posts with #2Articles1Week but only after I joined the Hashnode Ambassador Discord channel I find out there is this challenge. By now I could have earned these badges if I start using the hashtag since the beginning but I am not worried as I do not see much chance for not posting 2 articles per week. Just the Hashnode Weekly by Miki Szeles and the reposting of the Medium Weekly by Miki Szeles will earn this badge for me. 😊
Crazy Blogger
In case you want to have this badge, you have to post it on 7 consecutive days. It is not that hard as it sounds. Just write a loooong article and split it up into 7 smaller ones.
No, I won't split this article into smaller ones, I would like to be on Hashnode's Guinness record page. 😊
Whenever I post this article today, it will be my 6th day from the challenge. Actually, by that time, I will already have the 7 articles but there were 2 days when I posted twice. As I already have a few articles written getting this badge will be easy peasy. 😊
Talk of The Town
Well, this challenge is a little bit mystic as there is no exact information provided on how to achieve it. The description only says " Write an article on your Hashnode blog that receives high engagement from the Hashnode community".
I thought I will earn this badge from this article, but as I did not get notified (only one day later) I just realized that I have earned this page yesterday. Yaaay. 😊
And recently there was one more badge that we could get
#WomenWhoTech
In this challenge, you have to post an article about the topic of Women In Tech with the tag #WomenWhoTech. I consider this topic very important and I support it as much as I can. This time with this article: Happy International Women's Day - Miki Szeles's words about Women in Tech 💝
So that's all about the current challenges. But as I mentioned above I really love challenges that inspire me to become better so I came up with some ideas for new challenges and badges.
My suggestions for further challenges and badges
Daily Challenges
With daily challenges, you could earn badges or accumulate a total count on how many times you achieved it. An example can be: Write a 500 words article today.
Weekly Challenges
Same as above, but with a one-week time span. The #2Articles1Week could be also converted to 2 badges:
- Badge 1: Total number of times you have accomplished the challenge. This number will grow indefinitely.
- Badge 2: Longest streak of accomplishing the challenge. This always shows the highest count, but in the background, there is a counter which resets when you fail to do the challenge
Monthly Challenges
These can be challenges specific to a certain month like March. I know this is a stupid example and I am pretty sure you can come up with a better one: Write a post about how the start of spring with March affects your daily life. Use the hashtag #march.
Extreme Challenges For Crazy Persons Like Me
- Post daily for 1 month
- Post daily for 1 year
- Write a 5000 words article
Customized Challenges Based on Your Current Progress
It is great to have challenges to write an article twice a week but it would be even better if these challenges would be tailored to your current progress.
Comment Warrior
There could be different levels of this badge or it can have an exact count on it showing how many times you commented on Hashnode. It can be even separated into 2 badges one is for interacting with your readers by commenting on your posts and the other one is for commenting on others' posts.
Article Connected Challenges
Having my badges on my very own Badges page is great, but what if we would give the chance for our articles to do the same too. The Badge Word Warrior could appear right beside your article to where it really belongs. And of course, there could be much more badges like badges for reaching a certain amount of visitors, badges for reaching a certain amount of interactions, comments.
Fans
It is not a challenge, but it would be a cool feature. Based on the time a person spends on reading your articles and based on the number of interactions and comments on your posts a reader can be "promoted" to a fan which could be visible when they are commenting. At the moment I answer to each comment on my posts, but in case my reader base is continuing to grow with the current rate, then there will be a time when I won't be able to answer all of the comments, but in case I could see a comment is from a fan, then I would give a higher priority to answer them.
Here is the feature request for this. Please upvote it if you like the idea! 👍
Whenever I first submitted my feature request I just copy-pasted the text from here with markdown, which resulted in creating a post instead of a feature request. So I also submitted a bug report.
I really love to improve myself and my surroundings, so I posted one more feature request, as it is not easily possible to find the issues reported by me. In case you type in your name into the search bar nothing will appear.
But that is enough from the feature requests for a while, but 😊I know some of them are still coming in the upcoming chapters.
Monetization attempt #3
There are 2 problems with solutions like Uphold and Buy me a coffee. In order to send money to someone you have to Register, then upload money, and then send the money. That is an extremely cumbersome process. Personally, I never did that even if I read an excellent article.
In order to solve this problem, I decided to use Google AdSense to insert ads into my page. I would happily click on (usually relevant) links whenever I read articles to support the writer.
In theory you should see an ad here:
But as you can see it is not there. Of course I understand that including an arbitrary script in your page is a security risk, this is why I created the ticket in which I request to add Google AdSense support to Hashnode. Please upvote the ticket in case you would also like to monetize your blog this way.
Whenever I got to know that Medium.com has a subscription form which a huge portion of the money goes back to the content creators I subscribed to it without hesitation to support the fellow bloggers.
It would be awesome if Hashnode would have an optional subscription, from which most of the money would be distributed to the content creators. I have created a feature request about this, please upvote it in case you support this idea. 👍
My First Month (Plus a Few Days) In Numbers
I really appreciate you taking the time to read up till here. I promise this will be almost the last but quite exciting section. 😊
Following and Followers
At the moment I am following 46 awesome content creators, I decided to share the list here, so you can check their content and also follow them if you find it relevant to you. 😊
Rafael Câmara Deepa Goyal Paloma Jewel Keith Yoshi Carlos Balbuena Pacifer York Ji Ho Yoo Angela Ni Maxi Contieri Diego Ballesteros Atharva Shirdhankar Mr. Bud CODE Ahmed Ramy Ebere Vivian Victoria Lo Amr Khaled Chris Bongers Kenya Carl Alvin Karanja Jinesh Shah Jonathan Chirk Chris Nunez KobbyDom (Dominic Adomako Darko) Tosin Adewale Alyssa Drum Saurabh Suresh Powar Brian Scramlin Nwokocha Maruche Fadya Joudah Abdelmadjid Cherfaoui Jorge Romero Rajiv Verma Alex Kates Kamaljot Singh John Amiscaray Vinamra Jain Samina Geek Tech Wampamba David Richard Fernando Jake LaCaze Anosh Bhakare Abhiraj Bhowmick Marcin Wosinek Sam Sycamore Raghav Singh Gulia Bence Hornyák
96 Hashnode bloggers considered my content worthwhile, so I would like to say thank you to all of you. 😊Maja Iwinosa Sanne Nche Farouk Badmus Allison Villarreal Raviteja Mannam mostafa Ji Ho Yoo Hrishikesh Pale Yoshi Shiju 見える Allister Beharry Christianah Ganga K Joshua Personal Chukwuebuka Collins Vienna Adiele Muoki Nzangi Tamás Szeles Milan Sachani Rajesh Sagayanathan Ravikumar R Gabriel Uzowulu Angela Ni Rakesh Hu LiHong Suraj Vishwakarma Merja Shourov Dheeraj Choudhary Yash Khanduja Jym Cheong Ahmed Essam Gegi Pirtskhalava victor umeh Ranojit Kumar Victor Eronmosele Swati Sarangi Tam Pham Danquah Bernard White Utsanjan Maity Ka Fai Thiyagarajan Saurav Pati Renan Franca Shively Marco Neumann Randy Knight Ninotna Tanishq Singh Anand Joseph Wallace Bojan Skrchevski Rustam Niyazov Balint Derek Rodger Yassine BENNKHAY Zsolt Ilonczai Szabolcs Retfalvi Bruce Wells Alemoh Rapheal Baja Prashant Singh Ahmed HZAMI Mr. Bud Sahesh Vectorly Ahmed Ramy Péter Teszáry Miss Rin Chris Bongers Favour Okunowo Amr Khaled Israel Santiago Amanuel T Rakisol Hembrom Denis Cabrera Ebere Vivian Jorge Romero Kaizen + Joy | 🦄1337code grinder Moureen Caroline Tosin Adewale Chris Benjamin KobbyDom (Dominic Adomako Darko) Alyssa Drum naveenkumar j Steffan Lee Shai Almog Saurabh Suresh Powar Brian Scramlin Victoria Brian Scramlin Victoria Fadya Joudah Rajiv Verma Mahmoud Shabana Raghav Singh Gulia Wampamba David Jake LaCaze Bence Hornyák
Pageviews
Thanks to the advanced analytics coming by being a Hashnode Ambassador I can show you some insights about my blog.
As you can see I had 14.5k page views and 10k visitors in this short period of time. Which is an awesome achievement in my opinion. 
The average visit time was 2m 10s which means people spent 14500 * 130 / 60 = 31417 minutes by reading my blog which is 523 hours which is a little bit more than 21 days.
If I would get 1 cent for each minute I would be a multimillionaire(in Hungarian Forint😊) by now. 😱😊
But wait, in case I check the same period with Google Analytics I get a completely different result:
What can be the reason for this Hashnode?
So let's do the calculation based on Google Analytics : There is very important data in Google Analytics that is missing from Hashnode analytics, which is the Bounce Rate.
The Bounce Rate tells how much percentage of the visitor left your page immediately without interaction. So in order to get the meaningful visitor count I have made the following calculation: 12000 * (1-0.8715) = 1542 visitor.
Now we have to calculate the average reading time in minutes : 1542 * 46 / 60 = 1183 minutes
1183 minutes is still an awesome achievement but it is still a 26 times difference. Luckily this feature is only a beta feature, but I would highly recommend thinking through what might cause these huge differences.
Let's continue bragging. 😊
During this time my articles have been featured on Software Testing Weekly 4 times and 1 time on Software Testing Notes. It brought some attention to my blog, but the craziness started when daily. dev featured my post How to Create a Legendary GitHub Profile?.
Actually, it was partially a repost of naveenkumar j's article, but I also added extra value to it:
- I have added a catchy title which is crucial if you would like to grab the attention of your audience.
- I wrote about how awesome it is to read Hashnode as it is full of excellent articles, which is also a good advertisement for Hashnode - I wrote about my Hashnode Weekly
- I have included an image that clearly saw how legendary a profile can you make.
- Last but not least as I always linked the original post. I am pretty sure Naveenkumar got also a few thousand visits thanks to my to my post. Is this true naveenkumar j?
In case we remove this post from the equation we can get a much clearer view of how my articles performed during this period.
The result is 6190 page views which I still consider a great achievement in a little bit more than a month.
Most popular articles
In order to get the list, I have to use the Advanced Analytics beta feature as the normal Analytics page has no feature with which we could order posts based on a certain column like Visitor count.
After the first article, my homepage comes with 1190 views about which I am quite happy.
The third one is my article How Google Tests Software - What we can learn from Google? - A book extract By Miki Szeles with 627 views which got a lot of attention from the testing community. One person even promised me he will buy me a coffee. 😊
The next 3 posts Save dozens of minutes daily during writing Selenide and Selenium E2E automated tests using the Selenideium Element Inspector Chrome Extension!, The Future Of Testing Frameworks - A report by Miki Szeles and Selecting an End to End Testing Framework - Selenium or Selenide? with 626, 539 and 325 views. I am very happy about this, as one of my main goals by blogging is to become an internationally recognised test automation expert. Quite a good first step I would say. 😊
Going further on the list you can find my 2 Hashnode Weekly Articles (247 and 229 views). I am very proud of that newsletter, as I do think I give value both to my readers and also to my favourite writers. I will keep going with this newsletter as I got a lot of positive feedback, who knows maybe there will be times when these newsletters will get the most views from all my posts.
I also brought a screenshot from the basic analytics as there are parts where it excels in comparison to the advanced analytics. 
We can deduct multiple insightful facts from this table:
- There is a huge difference between the visits of my most popular articles in comparison to the data provided by advanced analytics. According to the basic analytics I got 9600 views but the Advanced Analytics tells I got 8310 visits.
- In case you look at the numbers you can see despite the GitHub article is far the most popular post, it got less interaction here (4 comments, 54 reactions) than my Hashnode Weekly 003 (15 comments 72 reactions).
I am really proud of the latter one as I got soo much reaction with only 266 visits, which is quite a good ration I would say.
Here is the screenshot from Hashnode: 
It would be awesome if people could react to your posts without having a Hashnode account , but I would leave the comments to Hashnode users, to avoid trolls , as trolls are everywhere, even in the tech world. I have already felt it on my own skin.
So again I have created a feature request. Please upvote it in case you found this feature useful. 👍
It would be also great if you Hashnode Team could combine these 2 lists into one, in which you can see not only the page views but also the comment count and reactions, and you could also sort the list based on the above mentioned columns.
As far as I know Hashnode centers the images by default , but it looks like this feature is broken so again I have created a bug report. Please upvote it in case you would like to be able to center your images. 👍
As you might already got to used to it, I have created a feature request 😊. Upvote it if you could use the improved version of analytics. 👍
Referrers
This one is a pretty useful page. You should know who are referring your articles.
Having highly appreciated referrers can really boost your search engine ranking. This is how I got to know that I was featured in Software Testing Weekly and also on Selenide.org.
I even contacted the creator of the newsletter, thanked to him personally and we also had some nice discussions.
I will skip browsers, operating systems and devices as they are not relevant for me at the moment.
Countries
In order to get a better picture about your audience you should definitely have a look at this list too.
As you can see India is on the top (1750 views) about which I am not surprised as there are tremendous amount of excellent professionals in India and let's be honest India has a freaking lot of citizens. 😊
The United States comes next with 1060 views about which I am not surprised again.
Before my country Hungary (407) France(631) and Brazil(587) comes about which I am quite surprised. I would have expected Germany or Russia at this position and I absolutely never thought Brazil will make it to this quite prominent position.
Time of visit
This info comes from Google Analytics but it is very very important. Based on this you can decide what is the best time for your article to post.
It is a little bit tricky to get this report , but just follow the instructions here!
Based on this chart I can predict when will I get the most engagement on my post. As I definitely would like to post this today and I want to post it as soon as possible, the best hour seems to be 9 o'clock, so I have pull up my socks to finish writing it. 😊
That's enough about Analytics, so let's see another greatest value of Hashnode.
Hashnode's Greatest Value #3 - Being an Ambassador Many perks are coming coming with becoming a Hashnode Ambassador.
Here is the list:
- Access Beta Features
- Gold Profile Ring
- Reading History
- Who Liked My Article?
- Audio Blog
- Custom CSS
- Source From GitHub
- Exclusive Discord Group
- Tweet about your Hashnode experience. The top 5 tweets every month will be eligible for Hashnode's Dev T-shirt and Stickers.
That is an amazing list of features. Here's the deal: you can easily become a Hashnode Ambassador by inspiring 3 people to join Hashnode.. Just share your referral link. They do not even have to post anything, it is enough to have them here in the community. I am absolutely sure, sooner or later they will start blogging anyway. 😊
Final words
And we have arrived at the end of my story. I really hope you found it insightful I would happily read your thought and your own experiences in the comment section, so please support me by leaving a comment on this article. 👍
And now I go and publish the article and share it on Twitter as I really really want to have a Hashnode T-shirt. It would be pure awesomeness walking into the office in a Hashnode T-shirt. 😊
Spread the word about how awesome Hashnode is, so please hare this article on social media! 😊
In case you do not want to miss my posts , just follow me here on Hashnode, on LinkedIn, on Twitter on Medium.com, on dev.to and even on Instagram. 😊
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