Jul 16 2008

My StumbleUpon Beating

I’m currently being pounded by StumbleUpon users thumbs-up’ing my geek t-shirts page, so will finally see tonight whether WordPress is capable of filling the gaps that my custom blog system left wide open. Just to be on the safe-side, I’ve installed WP Super Cache, which was the primary reason for ditching the theme switcher and creating this new theme.

Of course, it goes without saying that I’m not complaining about this traffic spike, and positively encourage people to Digg/Thumbs Up my pages via StumbleUpon. In fact, if any of you reading this are StumbleUpon users, don’t forget to join the StumbleUpon fanlisting too! :D

Update (aka HOLY SHIT):

over 15,000 hits

Update (aka IT HASN’T STOPPED):

over 19,000 hits

I honestly didn’t think WordPress (or Site5 for that matter) would be capable of handling this kind of traffic. I hereby find myself eating humble pie.

10

Tags: , .

Warning

This post is over 6 months old. This means that, despite my best intentions, it may no longer be accurate. Age, motherhood, experience, loss... these things have all changed me from when this blog was started back in the heady (ha) days of my youth.

As much as I would like to go back and edit 10 years of archives to provide an insight into the 'me' of now — to update coding snippets and revise website advice — it would probably take years to do so (by which point I'd have to start again!) This would defeat the point of keeping these archives anyway.

Please take these posts for what they are: a brief look into my past, my history, my journey.

10 Responses so far

  1. Rhys says: July 16, 2008 at 7:52 pm # ·

    Do you know, when/if we finally meet, I have a scary feeling we’d both be wearing “May the Way of the Hero lead to the Triforce” t-shirts ;)

  2. Arwen says: July 17, 2008 at 1:27 am # ·

    lol. I like your geek shirts, they make me giggle.

  3. Cel says: July 17, 2008 at 5:18 am # ·

    Oo, I’m rather tempted to join StumbleUpon…the geek tees are pretty awesome.

  4. Melissa says: July 17, 2008 at 2:53 pm # ·

    Oh, now that is a lot of hits even from StumbleUpon.

    If I remember rightly, I think the most pageviews that one of my articles managed to pull from SU was around 5000.

    I still don’t think bloggers really use StumbleUpon to their best advantage though, there really is a whole market out there that isn’t being tapped into by blogs. Yes you can stumble through videos, news items and photographs but I’d love to see a feature there to stumble interesting and humorous blog entries too.

  5. Erin says: July 17, 2008 at 5:14 pm # ·

    Good grief! That amount of referrers is insane.

  6. Elbrus says: July 17, 2008 at 6:57 pm # ·

    I am impressed. I’ve never seen a traffic spike hitting 20K users from a Stumble. I am impressed that your server took the traffic in stride. If it had failed would have been your hosting more than wordpress from my experince. Love the “Geeks are for life, not just for computer breakdowns”.

  7. Mimi says: July 17, 2008 at 10:18 pm # ·

    Woah, 20k users from StumbleUpon?! :O
    I heard WP Super Cache is absolutely amazing when it comes to these traffic spikes. Supposedly makes your site digg-proof
    Definitely looks that way to me!

  8. Gary R. Hess says: July 18, 2008 at 7:47 am # ·

    WP Super-Cache is completely awesome. I had some problems with it when I first installed (htaccess wasn’t changing–my problem of course), but once that was fixed I could definitely tell the difference. I’m sure with as much Stumble traffic as this blog receives you will benefit greatly.

  9. Christine says: July 26, 2008 at 5:12 pm # ·

    wow. ^^ i’m impressed too~

    i’ve never even thought to submit myself to stumble. too scared i think !