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.
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! ;)