Well . . . I had heard about having other people’s servers get overwhelmed by Digg.com, but it hadn’t before happened to us. Until today.
Last night, I had put up a post about a psychology site that let’s you “average” faces, resulting in incredible attractive (mathematically generated) faces of men or women. Really fascinating (and fun). I naively titled the post: “I created a woman so beautiful she made me melt.” Which was true, as you’ll (someday) be able to see . . .
I sent the post to Reddit.com and digg.com. We received higher than average traffice all day (many more than 12,000 unique visitors today so far), but then our site froze up. It’s hard to tell at this point, but it appears that the Digg folks came over in unbelievable numbers–so overwhelming that this site was brought almost to a standstill. I was eventually able to get back in and convert the post to an (unviewable) “draft,” where I’ll keep it until things calm down.
To avoid this problem in the future, Nick Smith, our designer (nicksmithdesign.com) advises that I will need to incur serious monthly charges for the next higher level of hosting. Hmmm.
If you can get through to read this, that’s what’s been going on today. If you visited us today, but couldn’t navigate the site briskly, please give us a few hours. We hope to be back to normal. Interesting stuff, the Internet.
So, that's what happened! I was typing up a comment on that Beautiful Woman article and next thing you know, I was getting a page that said "Gateway Timed Out". Hope I wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back lol.
Sorry for the double post, but did you lose an article/post? The reason I ask is because I remember posting a response to a short article you wrote pertaining to you being out of touch because you weren't aware of the "Devlin Case". I pretty much just raked you over the coals a bit for it stating why it was just as important a story as the coverage of dying soldiers in Iraq. But, now I look over all of your listings and I don't see it anymore.
Did the problem yesterday cause it to be lost?
Sorry again… promise this to be my very last post on this subject. I just wanted to apologize because I found the article I was talking about and it was written by Dan Klarmann, so that's why it didn't come up on your listings. Once again, I'm sorry for so many posts in a row… It's not my usual practice.
Isn't it funny that we got so much response for a post that might be on a porn site? We don't have that problem talking about campaign finance reform.
Just to clarify, in case you couldn't get through to the face-averaging site. The site is not at all porn. It's a legit psychology site. The title to my post, did, however, suggest that the site was about a beautiful woman. And did the traffic ever come crushing in!
And Devi is right. No matter who writes the world's most eloquent post about campaign finance reform (a topic that relates to the way we resolve life and death issues), it would never have gotten a small fraction of the traffic. Let's just begin the title to every serious post with a catchy phrase: "Naked woman discusses campaign finance reform." Maybe shoot videos with naked people discussing serious issues. Maybe then, we can help thousands of people (who are apparently off chasing posts about sex) focus on these serious issues.