fplanque: dev blog

Unique IPs / 5 minute intervals

My post on iPod car integration got slashdotted last night. That really caught me off guard!

It is pretty incredible how fast the hordes of new visitors arrived. I only noticed about 1 hour later that the server had gotten insanely slow. It didn't crash though (Thanks Debian ). So I made a static page of the post and (mod_rewrite) redirected to it. That brought the server back to normal speed.

Top referers

Of course slashdot is now my top referrer of the week... by far (as shown by b2evolution).

Ironically, I actually submitted the post to digg.com, but it was slashdot who picked it up! Sure digg shows on the pie chart, but it's actually less than 1% referrers.

There would be two possible explanations:

• Either the digg community was less interested in this subject than slashdot
• or... on shlashdot, all you need is ONE editor to like your post and you're in for 10 000 visitors. On digg, you need quite a few people to like your post before it makes it to the home page...

I think I just got lucky on slashdot. Thank you Timothy! It's been a thrilling experience!