If you know me, don't read this

I apologise for the clickbait-sounding title, but I guess in an intensely annoying way I'm just going to blend in with the rest of the Internet - which I hate. Not because I want to be different, but because I bloody hate clickbait. Perhaps I'm on the Internet far too much to not recognise when "21 unusual uses of cheese - you wouldn't believe #20" will be a pile of garbage. I'm looking at you, Buzzfeed.

So anyway, on with the show. A few days ago I was trying to get Facebook sharing working with my blog. Turns out it's harder than I thought it would be to get the Facebook SDK working with Jekyll. Maybe I'll impart my wisdom and do a separate blog post about it at some point. It's pretty specific and definitely won't apply to most of my readers, but the demand is definitely there. Getting Facebook sharing to work 100% was pretty difficult to do, and as a result I was doing lots of tests by attempting to share a blog post to my own Facebook timeline, making sure to change the privacy to share with 'only me'. I should add, it was easy to get Facebook sharing to work, but it was refusing to add those nice little preview images along with it, so pedantic me was trying for two days to get this to work. At the end of day two it FINALLY worked. I saved my progress, closed my laptop, tried to ignore the fact that it was now 2am, and I went to bed.

I woke up to the following message from a workmate:

"I enjoyed your blog post.
Mostly because that's just my project in a nutshell (No stack overflow etc)"

For some reason my heart sank and I felt bizarrely embarrassed. How did he find my blog? I've only mentioned it to a select few people in passing, and they don't even know the URL! My audience in my mind consists only of Internet strangers whom I'll never meet, ergo nobody I know will read my (in my opinion) sub-par style of writing and judge me. Then it hit me... I didn't change the privacy of the final test from the previous night to 'only me'. Sure enough, there it sat on my public timeline for the entire world to see. Another surprise? It had garnered nine likes.

I don't write for my friends. As previously implied. So despite the fact that a few people that I know got something out of reading it, the thought of sharing my own stuff in an act of shameless self-promotion still made me cringe. It probably shouldn't, but it did. Perhaps this accident is positive. The quick band aid rip which will make me feel more comfortable with people I know having a deeper insight into what makes me tick as a person and a programmer.