Author Archives: Maria Langer

I Don’t Like Being Seriously Dugg

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The activity finally winds down — I think.

In yesterday’s post, “Getting Seriously Dugg,” I reported the history of a blog post that rose quickly to stardom in the world of Digg users. But that report was done early in the day, before the shit hit the fan (so to speak).

The Heat is On

The Digg count continued to rise throughout the day. And the hits kept coming. All morning long, there were at least 100 visitors online at my site at once. This is not normal here. And it was rather frightening. I kept expecting something to break.

But it wasn’t just the popular Digg post that was getting hits. It was the post about getting Dugg, too. Soon, it had more hits than the dugg post — even though it wasn’t dug by anyone at all. I’m still trying to figure that one out.

Things came to a head at 11:15 AM when I got an e-mail message from my ISP:

Our Hosting Operations Admins have alerted us to an issue with your hosting account. The account has overutilized resources within the shared environment. As a result, the account has been moved to an isolated server for Terms of Service violators. You have 30 days to research and resolve this issue. After this time, the account will be evaluated again. If the issue is resolved, the account will be migrated back to the shared environment. If it persists, you will need to move to a full Dedicated server.

I got on the phone immediately and called my ISP. To my knowledge, I hadn’t violated any terms of service by getting hits. My plan allows 2,000 GB of bandwidth per month. The billing month starts on the third — that day. So far, in all the years I’ve hosted there, I’ve never exceeded 6% of my monthly allowance. Just because I was getting 30 times the usual number of hits I get in a day, it was still not much more than I’d get in a total month. So there was no way I’d even come close to 10% of the monthly allowance — let alone exceed it.

The guy who answered the phone was extremely polite but equally clueless. He had to talk to Advanced Hosting. He couldn’t let me talk to them. They gave him a song and dance about too many domain names pointing to the same site. He attempted to hand the same thing to me. I told him that that shouldn’t matter since none of those domain names were advertised anywhere. Besides, there were only about a dozen of them pointing to one site and maybe 15 pointing to another. I wasn’t aware of any limitation.

“I’ve been dugg,” I told him. When I got no answer, I asked, “Do you know what that means?”

“No,” he said.

I explained that it meant that one of my blog’s posts had become very popular and that people were flocking to my site to read it. I told him this was a temporary thing and that it should be back to normal by the end of the day. I hoped.

He told me that if I continued to get so many hits to my site, I’d have to get a dedicated server. I told him I’d evaluate after I’d seen my stats for the day. (My account is updated daily in the middle of the night.)

We hung up.

A Brief Intermission

I went flying. I took a couple from Virginia on an hour-long helicopter tour in the Wickenburg area. I showed them mine sites and canyons from the air. We saw a lot of cows, too. Afterward, I goofed off at the airport, chatting with two jet pilots who’d come in and were waiting for passengers. Then I went shopping for dinner. I got home and had a snack. Then I looked at Digg. It was 4 PM.

What Happened in Five Hours

The post that had started it all now had more than 1,200 diggs. It had been viewed almost 30,000 times. The post about that post, which hadn’t been dugg at all, had been viewed more than 40,000 times.

But thankfully, there were only 33 people online. So the flood had begun to subside.

On the Digg Technology page, my dugg post was listed near the bottom, under newly popular. (Ironically, on the same page, near the top, was a post about how Digg was losing popularity. That had more than 1,200 diggs, too.)

The Morning After

It’s the next day. I can now look back objectively on my blog’s day with a Digg Top 10 Tech post by studying some of the stats for the day and how the differ from other days.

My ISP reports that for the first day of my billing period — yesterday — I used up .55% (that’s just over half a percent, folks) of my monthly bandwidth. That means that if every day was like yesterday, I’d still come in at less than 20% allowable bandwidth. So I don’t know what “terms of service violation” they were whining about.

W3Counter, which I use to track page hits and visits, says I got just over 27,000 page hits yesterday. Look at the chart below; it makes my site look flat-line dead before yesterday. Honestly — it wasn’t that dead.

Hits

Today’s hits are about 3 times a normal day. Nice, but I’m willing to bet it drops down to normal within the next few days.

W3Counter also sent me an e-mail message warning me that their free service doesn’t cover sites that get more than 5,000 hits a day.They say I need to upgrade to a pro account for $4.95/month. We’ll see how long before they disable my current account — I’m not paying them to tell me how many hits I get when I can easily set up some stat software with a free WordPress plugin. (ShortStats, which we wrote about in our WordPress book, comes to mind.)

(I have not been able to reconcile page hits as reported by W3Counter with article reads as reported by a WordPress plugin. I have a sneaking suspicion that the WordPress plugin counts bots.)

Digg, as a source of hits, kicked Google out of the top spot on my site. Google used to account for 54% of my visitors. Now, for the 14-day period tracked by W3Counter, Digg is the big source. Google doesn’t even make the list any more, with all the different Digg URLs people used to find my site. So my sources stat is completely skewed and pretty much useless for the next 13 days. And 93% of the hits in the past 14 days have been to the 18-year-old mouse story.

Meanwhile, WP-UserOnline reports that yesterday saw the most users online at once on this site: 375. I don’t think this site will ever see that many concurrent users again.

My RSS feed subscriptions have more than doubled. That’s great. (If you’re a new subscriber, thanks for tuning in. And don’t worry — I don’t write about Digg every day.) It’ll be interesting to see if that number continues to climb or if I manage to scare all the new folks off by failing to provide more Diggable content on a daily basis.

My Google AdSense revenue for yesterday was right in line with an average high day. When you consider that I got about 20 times my normal number of page hits yesterday, you might think that I’d get 20 times the revenue. I didn’t. Obviously, Digg users don’t click Google ads.

The last I checked, the 18-year-old mouse story got just over 1,357 Diggs. I think that I actually encouraged the extra Diggs by placing the Digg icon at the top of the post. I’ve since taken it away from all posts.

I’ve realized that I don’t want to be seriously Dugg. Other than the surge in new RSS subscribers, there really isn’t any benefit to it.

What do you think?

Have you been slammed by being dugg? How did it affect your hosting account or other services? Use the Comments link or form to let the rest of us know.

Getting Seriously Dugg

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Wow.

On Wednesday, I wrote a story about my friend Jo’s 18-year-old computer mouse. It got a bunch of hits.

On Thursday, I realized it might be of interest to Mac users, so I submitted it to MacSurfer’s Headline News, not sure if they’d pick it up since it was already about a day old. I’m not sure, but I think they did. Throughout the day, I the piece got another 2000 or so hits — which is pretty standard for my posts listed on MacSurfer.

Somewhere in the middle of the day, the story got Dugg. By the time I realized it, it had 17 Diggs. That is a huge amount for any of my posts. My site doesn’t usually attract the Digg crowd for reasons I can’t fully comprehend. (I’m not sure what the Digg crowd is looking for and assume I just don’t deliver it.) I mentioned it on Twitter and got a handful more Diggs. But certainly not enough to get it on Digg Home page or even anyplace it might be noticed. By the time I called it quits for the day, it had 34 Diggs and about 4,000 hits. Cool, I thought.

This morning, I sensed trouble when I attempted to check my Web site. I got a 503: Temporarily Unavailable error. I figured that my ISP must be doing some maintenance. I tried a few times more. On the third try, I got through.

And saw that according to the WP-UserOnline plugin, I had 225 people online. At once.

This was mind boggling. One of the limitations of my hosting account is 50 concurrent hits to my MySQL database at once. That database is shared between 3 sites. I’d had MySQL errors before during peak times. I have a sneaking suspicion that my ISP may have removed that limitation. Which would be a great thing.

I think.

I Made the Digg Home PageThe 18-year-old mouse post had 10,000+ hits and 485 Diggs at 5:35 AM MST. But by the time I got to the Digg Home page — and found my post at the very bottom of the page, as shown here — it had 500 Diggs. So that means 15 more Diggs in less than 5 minutes. And another 23 Diggs in the time it took to write this. Egads!

Meanwhile, W3Counter, which I use to get hit stats for the site, reports over 7,000 visitors for today. I’m assuming that they use GMT rather than my local time. That would make it 11 hours rather than just 6. I cannot imagine more than 1,000 hits an hour.

Now if you’re saying “What’s the big deal?” you obviously don’t find these numbers as impressive as I do. You need to understand that this is a relatively unknown, limited-interest site. On a good day, I’d get 1400 hits from 1200 visitors. Today is off the chart — and it has just started.

And I’m worried. Worried about bandwidth usage. I’ve never used more than 10% of my total monthly capacity, but I’ve also never had what could turn out to be a 20,000 hit day. Worried about people who want to visit the site and can’t because of those darn 503 Error messages (I just got one again). Or, worse yet, worried about people who want to visit additional pages on the site and can’t because of those darn 503 error messages. After all, the site’s got a lot more to it than a story about an 18-year-old computer mouse finally crapping out.

So it’ll be interesting to see how today plays out. I assume the post will fall off Digg’s home page sometime soon and the flood of visitors will stop. Things will get back to normal. But until then, I’ll need to worry just a little.

And wonder whether getting seriously Dugg is a good thing.

Blog Mistakes? Or Choices?

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A closer look at “43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid” from Daily Blog Tips.

Yesterday, while trying desperately to catch up with the feeds I follow, I found “43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid” on Daily Blog Tips. Daniel begins the post with this:

There are several lists of web design mistakes around the Internet. Most of them, however, are the “Most common” or “Top 10” mistakes. Every time I crossed one of those lists I would think to myself: “Come on, there must be more than 10 mistakes…”. Then I decided to write down all the web design mistakes that would come into my head; within half an hour I had over thirty of them listed. Afterwards I did some research around the web and the list grew to 43 points.

His list of “mistakes” are pretty good. They include the usual bunch of design decisions that bloggers (or their template designers) make that could affect the popularity of a blog and/or its ability to generate revenue. But in looking through the list, I realized that I’m guilty of making a bunch of these “mistakes.” And although I understand the reason Daniel thinks they’re “mistakes,” I continue to do them by choice.

My “Mistakes”

While I encourage you to read Daniel’s post and get his point of view on all 43 items he lists, I’m going to take a moment or two to pick out the rules I break and explain why.

1. The user must know what the site is about in seconds.

There’s no better way to start breaking rules than to break the very first one. The majority of people who visit my site for the first time probably don’t know what the site is about within seconds. Why? Because the site is about so many things.

This is a personal choice. I decided about two years ago that I only wanted one blog. Following the rule that a serious blogger should post at least once a day, it would be impossible for me to post every day about five specific topics if I had five separate blogs. So I’ve taken the lazy way out and have just one blog with a lot of categories.

One of the ways I’ve gotten around this (or at least tried to) is by making good use of WordPress’s category feature and even going so far as to make it very easy to subscribe to a specific category feed. So if you only come here to read about blogging, you can just follow that feed (or category).

You do realize why everyone says this is so important, right? They assume that you’re trying hard to make your blog popular, probably so you can monetize it. Although I’d be thrilled if my blog started getting 10,000 hits a day, that’s not what I’m trying to do here. My goal is to journalize my life, share insight about the things I know or find interesting, and educate the readers of my books about things not specifically covered in those books. If those purposes aren’t apparent within seconds to first-time visitors — or even within weeks to repeat visitors! — well, that’s just the way it is. My choice, my decision. But I don’t think it’s a “mistake.”

5. Do not open new browser windows.

Guilty as charged. And I know that many bloggers and Web designers say this — including the usability expert, Jakob Nielsen. That made me think long and hard before I made my decision.

The rule I follow is this:

  • If the link is to another site or page on someone else’s site, I use the _blank attribute to open that URL in a new window — or, better yet, if the browser is set up to use tabs (as mine is), in a new tab.
  • If the link is to another page on my site, I usually skip the attribute so the URL opens in the same window or tab.

Why do I do this? Well, this is the way I like to browse the Web. When I see a link on an interesting site, I want to keep reading the site and check the links later. So I open the links in new tabs and, when I’m finished with the main page, view the links in their tabs — which are already loaded and waiting for me. (Understand that I access the Internet at only 512Kbps (on a good day).) This enables me to browse far more efficiently, without missing things I want to look into — and without dealing with the erratic behavior of the Back button when forms are involved. So I set up my site to work the way I’d like other sites to work.

Think about the branches of a tree. Each time you click an external link on my site, you’re going to a new branch. But the main trunk is still there. You can close the trunk and keep exploring the branch or switch back to the trunk at any time and continue exploring from there.

Well, that’s how I think about it anyway.

15. Do not break the “Back” button.

This is related to the previous item. Evidently, spawning new windows (or tabs) breaks the back button because those new windows (or tabs) don’t have anything to go back to. But I can argue that clicking an external link on my site takes you to another site and there’s no “back” on that other site.

It’s just the way I look at it, I guess.

24. Do not blend advertising inside the content.

I do break this one occasionally, but not very often. It’s usually with links to books or other products on Amazon.com (is that an ad?) or the occasional company-specific ad. I think it’s okay to do this once in a while, but the ad should definitely be related to the post content and there should not be an ad in the middle of every single post on the site.

There are a number of Web sites I stopped following because there were just too many ads — especially annoying, blinking or flashing ones.

33. Make clicked links change color.

Well, the links do change color here, but the change is not very noticeable. I think I need to work on that a bit. The reason I’m not in a big hurry to fix this is that pages change often here so what was at a link yesterday might not be the same content at that link today.

39. Include functional links on your footer.

I put this stuff in my header. I don’t see any reason not to include it in the footer as well — except that it’s pretty obvious in the header.

40. Avoid long pages.

Hey, I have a lot to say!

WordPress can be configured to display a certain number of posts on the Home page and any “archive” pages. An archive page is a category page, a date page, an author page — any page that groups one or more entries by a certain variable. The trouble is, the number of posts that appears on the Home page must be the same number that appears on the archive pages. What should that number be? I settled on 8 after trying all kinds of combinations.

My posts vary greatly in length. Some are very short — only a few sentences or paragraphs. Others are very long — 1500 words or more, with photos. I want the content area of each page to be longer than the sidebar area. But I don’t want the pages to be very long. That’s how I settled on 8.

While I understand the reason for keeping pages short, I also want to avoid the tricks required to pull off this design rule:

  • Write shorter posts. Changing the length of your post to meet a design need is an instance of the tail wagging the dog. Writers, in general, don’t like to do this. It tends to indicate that layout is more important than content. Since writers are providing content, it’s rather insulting to insinuate that what they have to say is less important than the way it appears in a Web browser window (or on a printed page).
  • Use the < --more--> tag. This is a WordPress feature that enables you to break a post into two or more pages. It has its pros and cons, which I plan to discuss in a future post. (The sad truth is, I woke up this morning thinking of the < --more-->. A more normal person would wake up thinking about breakfast or what they were going to do today.) In general, I don’t use it because I think it’s an inconvenience to readers. Why should I give my readers extra work just to keep my pages short?

My Score

So I’ve made 7 out of Daniel’s 43 listed “mistakes.” You should now understand why. Whether you agree or not is something you need to decide.

Have any thoughts about this? Don’t keep them to yourself. Use the Comments link or form to share them with other readers.

Today’s Flood

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Not as big a deal as last Wednesday’s flood.

For those of you interested in the flash flood situation at my sometimes-waterfront property…

It started raining about an hour ago and, for a while, it was raining hard enough to force the water in through previously unknown gaps around two of the windows in my house. Yes, water was coming in. But not enough to get upset about.

The roof dumped all of its water into our yard. The one drainage hole in the snake wall must be clogged because the water started filling the side yard. Not a big deal as it’s sloped away from the house.

The wash started flowing about 10 minutes after it started pouring. The wash drains the area northeast of Vulture Peak, which we can see from the back of our house. So if it’s raining hard at our house, that doesn’t mean the wash will flow past it. It must be raining hard between our house and Vulture Peak for us to get waterfront property.

Today was the third time that has happened in 8 days. Last Wednesday was the biggest flow I’d seen in the 10 years we’ve lived here. It ran again on Saturday, but we were out of town and missed it. Here’s the shot from this afternoon. Not very impressive, is it?

Another Flood

One thing to note here. You see those three roundish things on the lower right side of the photo? Those are the concrete balls around the base of my neighbor’s new fence posts. The fence was installed less than six months ago. Each of those balls is at least a foot and a half in diameter. That didn’t keep the posts in. The fence was washed downstream over my other neighbor’s driveway. He evidently dragged them back upstream with his ATV to get them off his driveway.

His driveway, of course, was washed away again. No big deal. It isn’t paved.’

Oops! Lights just went out for about 20 seconds. Good thing I have a UPS. The lightning is close.

RadarA quick look at the weather radar shows a Flash Flood Warning. I live right around the “e” in Wickenburg on this map. The storm seems to be moving northeast, which is odd. But I might be reading the motion loop wrong.

This might not seem like a big deal to most folks who are accustomed to rain and flooding. But here in Arizona, the weather is about as perfect as you can get at least 300 days out of the year. It’s only for about one to two months a year that we get these exciting storms and the flooding that goes with them. Living right on a wash makes life interesting.

You see, as long as the wash is flowing, I’m pretty much stuck here at home. And anyone who wants to come here is just out of luck.

Well, it looks like this one is winding down. No excitement. But for the next one, I’ll try to include some video. Got to go find that darn camera.

WebCam Timelapse – July 31, 2007

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More storms.

My friend Tom took a great photo of the storm cloud that passed through Wickenburg yesterday. I thought it might be interesting to see a timelapse for the same day:

[qt:https://aneclecticmind.com/wp-content/movies/Timelapse-073107.mov https://aneclecticmind.com/wp-content/movies/Timelapse-073107-poster.mov 320 256]

Remember, after clicking this image, you may have to wait a few seconds for it to load before it starts playing. Be patient and click only once. It’ll play right in this window. QuickTime is required.

I live to the west of Tom (that’s to the left in this photo) about a mile away. Although you can see the storm clouds moving in in this timelapse, the view is different: Tom was looking northwest; my view is northeast.

Want More?

If you’re really into these timelapse images, you can download the entire set for July: 18 QuickTime movies in a 20.6 MB ZIP file.

Or you can do what a few folks at wickenburg-az.com have done: get on my e-mail list for a daily distribution of the day’s timelapse movie, mailed at at about 8 PM MST each evening. The distribution list is only used for the automated distribution of these timelapses, so don’t worry about spam. To get on the list, contact me. To get off the list, just reply to one of the distribution messages and let me know that you’ve had enough.