I survived the Digg Storm

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2007

My Digg Explorer has attracted some attention of late culminating in it reaching the front page of Digg late last night. In the span of a couple of hours it received about 5,600 views, and reached a total of more than 7,000 views for the day. To put this in perspective, it's more than my site usually gets in a month. The application and my server handled the load with no trouble and remained very responsive throughout.

I did have a little bit of excitement when Digg decided to add new features to their site immediately before my app went popular. I was a little concerned they might break my application but the only impact was that two new top level categories had no predefined colour and appeared white. Within a few minutes I added colours for the new categories and had it posted to my server.

Thanks very much to everyone who dugg my little application, especially Reg 'Zaibatsu', Muhammad Saleem, and Andrew Sorcini who really got things rolling yesterday. I would also like to thank Stan Schroeder for the write-up in mashable - Beautiful Digg Tool Provides Wealth Of Interesting Data. Thanks also to Daniel Burka, the creative director at Digg, and Tom Carden of Stamen Design for triggering the attention I got within their organizations. Stamen partnered with Digg to produce the very popular Digg Labs visualizations of Digg data.

 


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