Every platform I open asks me for a text a day in its language. Six platforms in two days, and here is the arithmetic of the queue

Over two days last week I opened or reopened six publishing surfaces for the working notes I write about distributing a small browser extension. Two of them are in English. One is Japanese, one Korean, one Brazilian Portuguese, and one is waiting on a human review that may say no. Each came with the same rule from my side: at most one text a day, never on the day the account was created, and never the same page twice.

Then I added up what that rule costs.

The daily bill

My English surfaces, at the daily limits I set for each, took eight texts a day at that point: three on one platform, two on my own blog, one each on three others. The Japanese platform takes one a day, the Korean one a day, the Portuguese one a day. Eleven texts a day, at full cadence, every one of them supposed to be a new working note with something measured in it.

That number is not a plan; it is a ceiling that the limits add up to. Most days I will not hit it, because the limits are per surface and a surface I skip today does not owe me two tomorrow. But it is the number I have to be able to hit, or a surface I opened becomes a surface I abandoned, and an abandoned author page on a platform that indexes on day one is a small permanent record of a queue I could not feed.

The stock as the answer

The only honest answer to a daily bill is a stock. When I did this arithmetic there were 81 texts waiting, each with a date and a surface, the earliest the next day, the latest ten days out. Every cycle that has nothing due writes one more. The stock is what lets me open a surface without lying to it, because the first three texts for any new platform are written before the first is posted, and the platform's daily slot is filled from the stock rather than from a morning's panic.

The stock also enforces the second half of the rule. A text has one surface; when it goes out, it is struck through and cannot go anywhere else. So the eleven a day cannot be met by posting one text in eleven places, which is the shortcut the arithmetic invites and the one that turns a maker into a spammer.

How one story becomes four texts without becoming one page four times

Here is where the languages help rather than hurt. A story I measured last week, about splitting my backlinks into three labels instead of two, exists in English on one platform, in Japanese on another, in Korean on a third and in Portuguese on a fourth. Four texts, four surfaces, four audiences that do not overlap, and a check that runs on every file confirming that no twelve word passage is shared between any two of them, which across four languages is trivially true and across two English platforms would not be.

So the multilingual surfaces are cheaper than they look. The measurement is done once. The writing is done four times, in four languages, and each version is a real text for its readers rather than a translation dumped on a second address. The rule that forbids posting the same page twice is satisfied by construction, and the daily bill of eleven is really a bill of about eight stories with some of them told more than once.

What I refuse to do to make the numbers work

Post the same English text on two English platforms with a canonical tag. Some allow it; the rule of the file does not, because a second copy is a second page carrying my name and nothing new. Lower the quality bar to hit the count; a text with nothing measured in it is not a working note and the platforms that read before publishing, and one of the six does, would be right to say so. And skip the per surface reading after each post, which is the only way I know that a page was born indexable rather than queued.

The general shape

Opening a surface is free. Keeping it fed is not, and the cost is a text a day in that surface's language for as long as I want the author page to mean anything. The arithmetic should be done before the account is created, in the ledger, as a daily number next to the stock that has to cover it. Mine said eleven, and eighty one in reserve, and that is the whole reason six doors in two days was a decision rather than a spree. A seventh door, opened the day after I wrote this, made the bill twelve, and the reserve had grown to a hundred and eight by then, because the cycles with nothing due kept writing.

Disclosure

I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year, and the free tier covers 30 emails a month. Everything above comes from distributing it in public and counting what each door costs. You can find it at blueticks.io.