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Brush With Digg

October 2nd, 2006

No, this isn’t a toothpaste ad. I had my first brush with Digg over the weekend when someone submitted a link to my recent Zune post, saying Apple better watch out. Seeing the rise in traffic was amusing, and early this morning my server had some MySQL problems which cleared up shortly after the article fell off the first few submitted articles pages. A small Digg effect? Perhaps, or maybe just an unlucky coincidence.

Anyhow, it seems there are ways to encourage such effects through what’s called “link baiting” or basically, writing snappy headlines to articles perfectly suited to the bored cubicle worker that reads digg. Basically, to sum up, the funnier suggestions are:

1. Write about Digg.

2. Appeal to the Apple Fanboys.

3. Doom and Gloom about Global Warming.

4. Microsoft Sucks.

Maybe there’s some appeal in doing this for popularity, fun, and profit, however on the other hand, the ensuing problems of seeing your site go down in flames sounds a bit scary. So there’s the flip-side, someone suggesting setting up your server to make use of a cache. Sounds like a good strategy to look into before I start the hard-core link baiting.

All in all this blogging thing is proving to be more entertaining than I imagined, even if I’m fighting off more spam than provocative comments, which naturally I blame all on Paris Hilton. Oh, and Microsoft sucks.

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  • Another thing to consider is that if you\'re using a shared server with your webhost (most smaller sites are doing this - but I don\'t know your exact situation), the server outage/problems could just as easily have been caused by any of the other sites you\'re sharing the server with. Even if they weren\'t this time around, it\'s something to keep in mind.

    In addition to caching (and if you\'re using a CMS system - there may also be cache modules that you might want to play with too) you may, eventually, want to look at a dedicated webserver. It would be more expensive, but I have a friend who is using a dedicated webhost, single server for a very popular cooking site (cookingforengineers) and he\'s handled the digg effect just fine with the single server.

    It\'s also probably a good idea to doublecheck on what kind of bandwidth overages you might be liable for (if it comes to that) too. This may not apply to you, but you could be in for a rude end-of-month bill if you find that your bandwidth exceeded your monthly allocation and you\'re forced to pay for the extra bandwidth at fairly high prenegotiated rate.
  • hmm, yeah, I still have no idea exactly what caused the funky stuff this morning. I am considering setting up a WordPress cache plug in for now.

    The dedicated server thing seems like a good idea eventually, but right now I am keeping my fingers crossed... If I were starting my own web business where it was critical the site was up all the time, I woudl do otherwise though :)

    Lastly, as for the overages I should look into that. The account bandwidth is *unlimited* but who knows what that means in the fine print.
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