The First Hub I ever Published

Flushed with success from 20 years as an adjunct professor in the Engineering / IT Department at a local community college, I hopped into HubPages with all 10 fingers on my ergonomic keyboard. My vision was simple; reformat the hundreds of sample programs used in my programming classes and then kick back on a tropical beach.

Alas. In the immortal words of Uninvited Writer: "There is no such thing as passive income."

My first hub was an adaptation of a program I wrote in C++ to demonstrate techniques for manipulating random numbers. I penned a relatively verbose (for me, not for Hal Licino) exposition followed by the actual code that I used in class. My sample programs are well-received in class; most students prefer to see real world stuff rather than listen to 50 minutes of lecture from some guy. I can easily spend twice that long ruminating over my little program. I break it, fix it, extend it, improve it, benchmark it, and tell stories about to it. I relate it to real-world problems that programmers solve. I give each student a copy and they follow along. Very few of them fall asleep.

Surprisingly, this hub consistently receives visits from Internet surfers. Could that many people be interested in manipulating random numbers in C++? I dunno. My baby was born on 4/19/09. It's registered 380 hits, which isn't a number that Aya Katz would raise an eyebrow at, but if all my hubs saw equal attention... I'd be buying a bus ticket to the bus station in Miami Beach.

In total visits, the little guy is #14 out of the 155 hubs I've published. Of course, it had the biggest head start. Relatively speaking it's a weakling. My most visited hub has welcomed 20 times more visitors in much less time.

Perhaps the time has come to revise my first born. HubPages has added a new component, the Code Capsule, that formats software text into real computer-sciency looking stuff. After being run through the Code Capsule, my programming looks good enough to be actually useful. The thing has sentimental value in its' current form. Making wholesale edits could become painful.

I'll always have a soft spot in my soft head for my first hub. Perhaps someday it will rise to the top of Google searches for "Random Numbers"; that should net me about 5 cents a day.