Digg Strikes Back: Webomatica Destroyed… Again

October 29th, 2006

Last week, I lit a firecracker and threw it in my house, setting it on fire and burning it to the ground. Just as I had begun sorting through the rubble in order to rebuild, a burning meteor fell from the sky, blowing everything to bits a second time (Can I get a diggnation t-shirt?).

To summarize, last week Thursday I submitted a link to one of my blog posts, Seemingly Stupid Apple Moves That Were Actually Brilliant, to Digg, a popular social bookmarking site. The “digg effect” of tons of Digg users wanting to read that story crushed my blog software (WordPress) and my hosting provider took my site down. It was pretty much disabled all of Friday and into Saturday morning.

The first dugg story.

I finally got access to my blog again on Saturday, and described the experience in a post titled Digg Destroys Webomatica. Some kind soul submitted that post to Digg on Saturday night. By the time I realized this on Sunday morning, the story had 30 diggs.

Oh crap, I thought, this time peppered with a heavy dose of “not again.” The story soon hit the Digg front page, rocketing up to 528 diggs. I had barely enough time to shoot yet another email to my hosting provider, warning of heavy traffic. They disabled my domain, more quickly than last time. Still, the story kept chugging along, reaching 627 diggs.

Dugg: The sequel, a mere two days later.

Note: The irony of my site being taken down a second time because of a story about my site being taken down a first time is not lost on me.

DuggTrends chart of my site being destroyed a second time.

Anyhow, I was hoping to use the extra hour of daylight saving time to improve my blog in preparation for higher traffic, such as installing a WordPress plug-in that enables “caching”, optimizing images, and possibly moving some things to another server. I also hoped to write about Battlestar Galactica, Persepolis 2, James Bond, and more Apple stuff. Unfortunately, because of the second coming of Digg, I had no time to implement any of this.

Still, I’m looking on the positive side. After all the dust settles, I’m hoping to gain a few more readers of this blog. Also, this situation is added incentive for me to improve. I readily admit I’m relatively clueless when it comes to high-traffic websites. I may even have to look into some better hosting options, although I’m reluctant to pay more for dedicated hosting.

But seeing how I’ve been caught with my pants down twice within the space of three days (!) I really need to figure this out sooner than later.

Note: Obviously since I’m now posting this, my site is back. This time, the turn-around from dugg to down and back was quicker. Lastly, thanks to some diggers for good suggestions about what I need to look into in preparation for a future digg.