Once while travelling..

I know, everyone under the sun has wrote about “their digg”. Digg has been around long enough that it’s no longer a cool claim to fame to have your site dugg. I don’t give a shit. Please don’t digg this article if you’re one of the 3 people that reads this - if it shows up on digg I swear I’ll replace it w/ a donate to the BC3 banner. If you want something to digg feel free to head over to simplehelp.net.

On Wednesday, September 27th, at around 9:57PM PST, my other site made it to the front page of digg. The tutorial was How to use your PC and Webcam as a motion-detecting and recording security camera. I totally confess to being the one to submit the digg, so for you jr. detectives out there, piss off.

Things I knew would happen, that did:

1. Traffic skyrocketed. I’m lazy so I’ll let the pictures talk for me.

2. Digg users ad-block. I have no idea what I’m allowed to say regarding my Adsense account, so I won’t say anything other than digg users enable ad blocking. Making it to the front page of digg was a personal goal, and I couldn’t have cared less that most people blocked the ads. I was tempted to remove them from the site entirely after it hit digg, but didn’t want to screw anything w/ the site up and cause it to go down.

Things I hoped might happen, that did:

1. Other blogs and web sites picked up on the tutorial and linked to it. Lifehacker (one of my personal favs) brought in almost much traffic as digg (on the 28th).

2. A fairly good number of people saved the page to their del.icio.us bookmarks, enough to have the tutorial show up on populicio.us, del.icio.us/popular, delicious.com, etc. Del.icio.us and its knock-offs/tributes brought in the 3rd highest volume of traffic.

3. My Technorati rating skyrocketed. In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think this matters at all.

4. Dreamhost (my hosting provider) held up. So far as I know (and I was very awake and watching very carefully) there was only a 2 minute period when I got 404 errors, and that’s it. No one on digg had to post a mirror.

Things I didn’t know would happen, that did:

1. On the 29th, the service stumbledupon.com started to drive huge volumes of traffic to my site. I had never heard of it before it showed up in my Google Analytics reports. Needless to say I’m a big fan now, as stumbledupon traffic continues to rise, while the others decline.

Things that DIDN’T happen, that surprised the hell out of me:

1. I thought for sure I would get dozens of “this is lame” comments on the actual digg post. There were only a few. Contrasted with the first comment I had on a tutorial that was linked to from a friends site, “Idiot. Hey buddy, free hint - if you discovered ways to get tickets that never fail you and you post them on the Internet, they won’t work anymore.”, the feedback was hugely positive.

Things I learned:

1. This should have occured to me much sooner - I tend to be too professional in my writing. No, obviously not on THIS blog; here I’m the opposite (rude as fuck and profane). Because I’ve been writing FAQs, manuals, marketing-crap, etc for corporations, I carried that no-humor/no-personality/boring-but-straight-forward writing style to my other site. The first thing I have that gets huge traffic was also the first thing that I wrote in a more laid-back manner. So - I’m going to make an effort to be a bit more relaxed over there and see if that helps. If it hurts, I’ll go back to the stick-up-the-ass style.