Getting on the front page of Digg is huge achievement for many Web developers, but is it really worth it? On May 19th, one of our articles on Thunderbolt - The Top 10 Most Entertaining Speedruns - made it to the front page and it gives us a chance to analyse what really happens once your site gets ‘dugg’.
During the first hour of being on the front page, we received 6,583 unique visitors. To contrast, we usually get around 600 a day. The second and third hours were similarly strong, as we got 5,918 and 4,032 unique visitors respectively. The traffic then tapered off as we moved off of the front page and on to the second, third and so on.
Although Thunderbolt is a fairly lightweight site, we ran out of bandwidth within 10 hours of being dugg. During the first hour, our host told me that we were going through about 4GB every 15 minutes! We quickly adjusted the limit and continued to attract visitors though. The traffic boost lasted quite a few days, helped on by a sizeable number of StumbleUpon users.
Using Google Analytics, we can also see where Digg users are and what sort of habits they might have. They spent less time on the site than usual, viewing an average of 1.44 pages (41% less than usual) and spending an average of 2:12 on the site (31% less). 94% hadn’t been on the site before (11% more than usual) and 79% left without going to another page (8% more). 72% were from the US, 10% from Canada and 6% from the UK. As you might expect, Digg users are pretty tech savvy. Only 16% used Internet Explorer, with Firefox dominating as the browser of choice with a 73% share. 15% also used Macs and 5% were on Linux, significantly more than most user profiles.
In total, the number of unique visitors produced by being dugg was around 48,500. That’s not bad for free, but Digg and StumbleUpon users don’t interact with your website in the same way that others might. We didn’t get any significant boost in the number of forum users, RSS feed subscribers or repeat visitors. So aside from using up all our bandwidth, being dugg hasn’t really had any worthwhile effect on the site. That isn’t to say that it isn’t nice to see these sort of crazy traffic numbers on a site you work on, but it’s certainly not sustainable.
Published in Websites, tagged Digg, Thunderbolt on 1st June 2008. No comments.
On the new version of Thunderbolt, there are three news feeds in the right column of several pages. We take news from other sites using RSS, then display it for users to read. However, there’s one problem; if you rely on other people to provide a service, then you can’t guarantee that it will always work.
This issue has appeared a couple of times on the site when the feed from GamePolitics.com went down. This caused the RSS parsing script on Thunderbolt to timeout, sending loading times through the roof. So what can we do about it? The solution is to cache (make a copy of) the RSS feed every so often and if we can’t find the original site, we just display the most recent version. You could do this in a couple of ways; cache the feed yourself or let someone else do it.
FeedBurner offers a free feed distribution and publishing service. Once they’ve ‘burnt’ your feed, you point your users to your feed on FeedBurner (who check and update their copy during the day). The main benefit is the bandwidth you save through offloading your RSS to FeedBurner, but what we’re interested in here is the ability to ‘burn’ any feed you like.
So here’s the cunning part; you set up a FeedBurner feed for the site you rely on - GamePolitics.com in this case - and then point your website to it. So if the other website crashes, you’re not affected because FeedBurner will keep running using a copy of the RSS.
Sending other websites’ feeds through FeedBurner first is a bit like sending your email through Gmail to filter spam. It’s free and keeps your site running smoothly no matter what happens to the website you’re taking the feed from.
Published in Websites, tagged FeedBurner, Thunderbolt on 20th April 2008. No comments.
My games website Thunderbolt has received a visual overhaul today, with a cleaner design and a number of new features.
The eighth version adopts a minimalist style which is designed to detract from article text and images as little as possible. I paid special attention to making the site as legible as possible and I’m really pleased with the result.
Aside from the visual adjustments, the new site also introduces comments for the first time and dispenses with the news. I asked myself what people enjoy doing the most and writing news was obviously that. Now the site is firmly focused on reviews, features and opinion, hopefully offering a credible alternative to the likes of GameSpot and IGN.
Published in Design, Videogames, Websites, tagged minimalism, Thunderbolt on 6th April 2008. No comments.
