Auto Parts for Brains

Digg Effect: 

“Derived from Slashdot effect, an insane increase in traffic after a link to a news article is promoted to the digg.com front page. This is sort of like an unintentional DDOS attack, but sometimes the increased traffic causes webmasters and bloggers to post links to their sites on Digg.
The digg effect will usually not have much of an effect on larger websites but small websites may be shut down quickly due to the server not being able to cope with the high amount of requests or because all of their bandwidth is consumed.”

*definition from Urban Dictionary

Though I have had previous warnings on how to prepare one’s site for the Digg Effect, I have not imagined experiencing it firsthand.  I guess I was wrong to assume that my blog can accommodate the traffic given that it is hosted on a pretty solid site. (Auto Parts Place,)

Like many Digg FrontPage Newbies, my initiation came as a crashed server after hitting the Digg FrontPage.  I’d have to say that nothing beats the frustration of having your site shoot blanks when a lot of people are trying to reach it.  This is further aggravated by the impatient Digg crowd who is never kind in their comments. After hours of work and communication with our host, we got the blog up again.  And although we did get some residual traffic from getting to the homepage a good 24 hours before, I cannot imagine the visitors we have lost because the server crashed.

Looking back at the experience, I did learn a few things about Digg and its effect.

• The first thing that my host suggested I do after we got the site back up is to enable caching of the blog and the site.  At present I am using Wordpress.  I found a good plugin called wp-cache that will cache the post pages of the blog at a specified length of time.  A simple code can then help in redirecting traffic to this cached page in case of another traffic surge.  Though this is not as good as coming up with a truly static page, setting the cache reload to a very high number will allow you to cache the blog to almost static.
• Go for normal HTML static pages.  These would be best instead of caching because the latter will still need PHP to build the page from cached data taking up more resources as compared to delivering a static HTML page.
• Opting to host some images or videos on another strong host like Flickr and YouTube may also ease the burden to your servers in cases of mass hits.
• Communicate with your host.  I found that the best thing to do is to prepare your site for anything such as the Digg effect.  This does not only prevent crashes in the future but also shows that you are confident that the future will hold better traffic for your site.
• Though, I have not tested this personally, I saw a webmaster claim to survive the Digg effect without caching on a shared server.  He claimed his CMS (Drupal) made his site resistant to the Digg effect.

Here are the other things that I have learned this weekend. 

• Digg users are fond of hit and run.  They go to the page of the site that reaches the front page and goes no further.  They do not navigate the site, sign up or register for anything, nor post comments.  Most comments will be on the Digg site itself. One must be prepared to take a beating as well.  From people looking at every imaginable flaw from your article to those who just want to annoy, comments are given unrelentingly.  If one looks at them carefully though, newbie bloggers like me can really learn a lot from the comments up at Digg.
• Digg users are a powerful force in the internet today.  When an article on Digg gets to the fron page, it rarely stops there.  Diggers post them to other social bookmarking sites as well.
• Aside from what is posted, who posted also matters a lot.  Many users in Digg have become popular over the years.  It is not surprising then that Diggers look up to many of these authorities for what passes as worthy of digging or not.  My post that made it to the frontpage was posted by user Charbarred, who has established his credibility with the much quality content he has submitted previously.

The Digg effect is something that every blogger or webmaster has to prepare for.  For a blogger like me, it provided a very strong motivation to write better quality articles in the future.

I am just crossing my fingers that in the future, my preparations will prove to be effective.  For the moment though, I am crossing my fingers that this wont be the last for my blog to make it to the Digg frontpage.

Reference:

Dealing with Digg

Keeping Your Site Up From the Digg Effect

Digg Effect Analyzed