Comments on: Beginner’s Guide to Surviving Digg’s Front Page

By: I Survived the Digg Effect (And So Can You!) at Ray Fowler .org

I Survived the Digg Effect (And So Can You!) at Ray Fowler .org — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:08:59 +0000

[...] Beginner’s Guide to Surviving Digg’s Front Page [...]

By: I Survived the Digg Effect! (Barely) at Ray Fowler .org

I Survived the Digg Effect! (Barely) at Ray Fowler .org — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:06:04 +0000

[...] Beginner’s Guide to Surviving Digg’s Front Page [...]

By: 75 Suggestions, Best Practices & Resources for Digg - KoMarketing Associates

75 Suggestions, Best Practices & Resources for Digg - KoMarketing Associates — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 15:11:13 +0000

[...] should be prepared for the massive amount of requests your web server will have to handle in a very short period of [...]

By: markus941

markus941 — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 21:52:39 +0000

Congrats on another successful Digg from your flock post. Good to see your site up

By: Flocking Behavior and the Digg Effect in Social Media

Flocking Behavior and the Digg Effect in Social Media — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:34:42 +0000

[...] a post so far – if you ever hope to reach the front page (which may lead to the Digg Effect, if you aren’t careful). Once reaching the front page, you will see a notable flocking effect. It’s pretty cool to [...]

By: Flocking Behavior and the Digg Effecti in Social Media

Flocking Behavior and the Digg Effecti in Social Media — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:32:47 +0000

By: brian

brian — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:51:06 +0000

@alan: thanks for sharing. Also a very good way to get things done. WP_cache will handle of a lot of the requests as static as well, but just remember to turn off any plugins that could slow down the load as well.

By: Alan Rimm-Kaufman

Alan Rimm-Kaufman — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:06:40 +0000

Another approach, if you have a story you know will get traffic, is put it on a lean fast server (all static) for the burst, then when things quiet down, move content back to real site and 301 the inbound links correctly. That's the approach we used on Water Balloon Stunt + Digg Homepage = 33,000 visits in 24 hours Cheers -- Alan

By: brian

brian — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:14:20 +0000

@ethan: thanks. Remember that most stories don’t make it anywhere on Digg. There are a number of other stories on here as to how to promote your blog – have a look around. Hope this helps you.

By: Ethan Christ

Ethan Christ — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:10:00 +0000

Interesting post, my problem though, is that I can’t ever get people do dig my stories. If anybody has any suggestions to increase traffic to my blog, let me know at http://poeticmoney.blogspot.com

By: brian

brian — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 06:48:24 +0000

@tad chef: yes, let’s think different and keep the server up this time around

@stefan: you raise an important point. While I typically don’t get into infrastructure discussions on this blog, in this case it is appropriate. My advice to those that are in a situation where their site is getting pounded and about to crash – if you have plugins such as “most popular posts”, consider deactivating them during peak traffic periods.

@giorgosk: good point – you don’t have to wait for Digg-like traffic to speed up page load for your readers. Show people that you are considerate by serving up an optimized page.

By: GiorgosK

GiorgosK — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 03:25:41 +0000

I am going to try out the wp-cache even though I have no fear of getting hit by digg hard … since most of my articles are not yet digg front page material … but still speeding up my page loads would be an advantage to my visitors

By: Stefan Juhl

Stefan Juhl — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 20:48:12 +0000

It’s worth adding that some wordpress plugins will kill the server even though wp-cache is used. Typical plugins that do this are the “most popular posts” kind of plugins etc. since they log every page request to the database…

By: Tad Chef

Tad Chef — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 20:21:57 +0000

Write how you swallowed your iPod mixing it up with an apple and you hit the front page big time.

By: brian

brian — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 17:43:30 +0000

@caroline: don’t fret, you’ll get there

There are many server monitoring tools that can ping your webserver to see if it is alive or not. More complex, non-static sites such as WordPress can also be checked to see the DB connectivity / health.

What I also find that works is trying to go to your own site. If you and others can’t get there, that’s usually a pretty clear sign it’s down

By: Caroline Middlebrook

Caroline Middlebrook — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 17:39:13 +0000

I don’t think anything I wrote would get on the Digg front page but this is still very good information. Do you know of any tool or plugin that can let you know if your server has actually gone down? I don’t think I’d have a clue if mine was down unless somebody told me!