I doubt anything I post will ever be picked-up by Slashdot, but I have hopes of being Slashdotted someday. I imagine it’s like a number of great things in life – watch what you ask for, you may get it. Having a traffic jump on the magnitude a big blog like Slashdot can drive your way sounds nice, but you likely need a plan to make sure you and your host doesn’t bend to the point of breaking.
Duncan was Slashdotted not long ago and here’s the lessons learned from the experience.
A few lessons, if a blog gets slashdotted its wise to turn OFF comment moderation straight away if you have it on, you wont be able to keep up. more…
Are there more lessons to learn? Any tips for those of us fortunate enough to have a fire hose of traffic pointed in our direction?
I have been Wonketted and also linked to by the Guradian UK blog and nothing killed me like http://www.memes.org getting a mention on NYTimes. But that was nothing compared to one mention on i-am-bored.com, believe it or not.
I have never experienced the flood of traffic that some people have, so I am not too concerned about it.
I guess I would mirror the interesting content on other sites, that I own or that friends would be willing to help with the mirroring. I would turn the page that has the content to static (using one of the WordPress plugins), and if there are images, I would reduce the quality of the images (and thus the filesize) until the swell of people was over.
Other than that, I would sit back and enjoy the ride.
I got one mention on BloggingPro and I spiked at 50,000 visits in one day. My one regret is that I didn’t have Google Adsense in optimised locations so I lost out on quite a bit of income.
I got slashdotted once a month back. Only 1800 people came by over 2 days. I guess the weekend drowned the traffic.
[…] logo’ and the future of the net economy
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Being slashdotted or similar is fun, and is like a nice virtual tap on your ego’s shoulder. But it’s not worth anything valueable. Slashdotters dont click on ads. Slashdotters dont come back. Slashdotters jump in, eat all the bandwidth, stress the CPU, and leave.
Expect an ego boost proportionnal to a bandwidth extra cost, but don’t expect more.
Agreed, anyone who has seen the Slashdot community on their forums know that there are rather intelligent people there, but some that are not exactly mature.
The biggest problem with being Slashdotted is the bandwidth issue by far. I’ve seen whole sites go down because of it.
This is a timely post for me, as one of my blogs, flickrDogs, was picked up by meta-filter this morning and I’m getting hit left & right…granted, it’s not in the thousands, but I’ve had over 700 this morning, and it’s only 9 am : )
Took me by surprise, so I guess it’s the kind of thing you should always be prepared for!