Last week this blog hit the Digg.com homepage for the second time since I started publishing my articles on it. The first time I got hit by the staggering amounts of visitors this results in was when I posted an article on creating themes for Typo. I was humbled and honoured and I felt proud because this was an article I spent a serious amount of time on.

This time around however things were different. I was astonished to see my visit count go through the roof by all kinds of places linking to this tiny entry in which I merely reposted an image I found on several other sites on the web. The post made it to del.icio.us/popular, the reddit.com frontpage and lots of other places of interest on the net. This all turned out to be only the beginning because the power of digg had yet to be released on me.

The post that caused all this has no original content, no effort from my side, nothing. In fact I even failed to mention that I think reverting to a table based layout just because it's sometimes hard to get my CSS to behave in all browsers is a sign of weakness I'd never agree with. To make a long story short: It was a 'quicky' I posted in less than a minute. Without completely thinking it through even. What makes the whole thing even more remarkable is the fact that the entry isn't at all recent. I posted it over a year ago. I couldn't believe what was happening!

The wonderful unpredictable internet

The whole course of events made me smile and once again realise how completely unpredictable the internet can be at times. One can spend a whole weekend writing carefully crafted posts like I did a while ago when diving deeply into client side performance tuning and hardly be noticed while a seemingly meaningless post apparently has the potential to drive traffic completely through the roof. 'Success' on the internet seems to be as unpredictable as the weather here in the UK.

Dreamhost

While I'm writing about this remarkable course of events I feel the techies at Dreamhost (especially Jeremy) deserve some special mentioning. Instead of simply pulling the plug on my site which was completely choking the server it's running on, Jeremy dove right in and tried to weak things in order to keep the page running, informing me about what he'd done by email. After some back-and-forth emailing we came up with a solution together which made it possible to stay 'up' most of the time during the insane traffic-surge the Digg.com frontpage entry resulted in.

I haven't always been happy with Dreamhost but but lately things have been getting better and better and the excellent support I received during my appearance on the Digg frontpage was truly remarkable. Once again thanks a lot for your help Jeremy!

Wrapping up

I love the internet! What's gonna be hot and what's not? It's almost impossible to tell what will happen from day to day. A big article? Or just some funny image? Even though it was fun to be on Digg again I do hope the next time it will be with an actual technical article again instead of one of my borrowed quickies.