Today’s post is an interview with Jacob Gube.  Jacob is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions, a web publication for web developers and designers, and the Deputy Editor of Design Instruct, a web magazine for designers and digital artists. He has over seven years of experience as professional web developer and web designer and has written Twitter.

1) Who are you and what is your website about?

I’m Jacob Gube, and I’m a web developer and web designer. I’m the founder and chief editor of Six Revisions (SixRevisions.com), a web publication that covers topics on web development and web design. I’m the co-founder and technical editor of Design Instruct (DesignInstruct.com), a web magazine for designers and digital artists that focuses on publishing useful tutorials on things like graphic design, web design, print design, and so forth.

I’m a book author as well; I wrote a book on a JavaScript framework called MooTools, which was fun.

I occasionally guest write on other blogs — I’ve written for Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, and Smashing Magazine.

Onto the second part of the question, which is what my website is about. I have two websites, actually.

The first is Six Revisions, and it’s about publishing articles, tutorials, howto guides and other types of content that people involved in building and running websites will find useful. We have over 70,000 RSS subscribers and receive approximately 1.5 million unique visitors per month, with about a +5-10% growth per month — so the site is still in a growing phase.

My other site is Design Instruct, which we started January 2010. It’s growing terrifically well, and we’re almost at the 10,000 subscribers mark, with major traffic growth that ranges from +30-100% per month; so the site is growing much faster than Six Revisions when we compare their life cycles.

2) Why did you start your blog?

I started Six Revisions as a way to share what I learned while building websites. It was a personal blog that I started more for myself, because writing helped me internalize and retain the things I encountered.

The growth was totally unexpected and now the site is no longer a personal blog, but a multi-author site with contributors from all over the world and from a wide range of expertise.

3) What has been the most explosive post on your blog and why?

It’s hard to say, really. We have a lot of content that do equally well in various ways and metrics (some better in direct traffic, some better in search engine traffic, some better in social media traffic).

If you were to ask me the one post that was pivotal — or rather, the harbinger — to the growth of the site, it’s 20 Websites That Made Me A Better Web Developer. This was a huge post traffic-wise because it became popular on Digg, and back then, when you got on the Digg front page, and especially on Top News, the traffic was huge. As I recall it, over the course of a week the post was viewed 100,000+ times because Digg has this natural effect of pushing your posts on other social media sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.

After that, things really changed. The site has never stopped growing since that one post.

4) What is the craziest/most interesting exchange you’ve seen in your blog comments and why?

Lots of discussions on the comments happen every day, so it’s hard to pinpoint one particular discussion to note.

5) What is the best article for a new reader on your blog to see?

It’s hard to pick one, so I’ll just pick one that I wrote, and one that I recently got an email about: Create a Slick and Accessible Slideshow Using jQuery.

Why would this be a good post to read? Because even though its title might sound technically challenging, everything is explained in detail. It covers modern best practices for coding, and it’s not just hacking together a script and calling it a day. It focuses on things like progressive enhancement, graceful degradation, and pays attention to details, without alienating those of us just starting out.

This tutorial embodies a philosophy that I promote with all of our writers, which is to focus on pragmatic and actionable information. Learning by doing. Readers learn without knowing they’re learning because they end up with a usable and functional product.

The other reason I picked this is because if you’re interested in things like jQuery and making awesome stuff for the web, then no doubt everything else will be interesting to you.

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