A perfect storm of traffic

I’ve been busy! Project B-2 Bomber went through a “perfect storm” of traffic. I had 4 all-time record breaking days in a row – meaning, every day broke a whole new record for single day unique visitors.

• Day 1: one post gets picked up by a blogger whose link sends hundreds.
• Day 2: same post gets picked up by a number of smaller bloggers, who collectively send hundreds more.
• Day 3: same post, plus several others, including several very old ones, get picked up by Stumble Upon users, who send thousands
• Day 4: an industry news source picks up yet another post and sends a few thousand – while the Stumble Upon/blogger thing is still going
• Day 5: traffic slows down somewhat, but I gain some really valuable inbounds

My feed subscriber record got broken, too. This all resulted in… not a Digg effect, but a nice steady wave of traffic, complete with some new commenters – most of whom had something useful to say and will hopefully stick around as regular readers (as opposed to the time a snarky forum sent us 25,000 people in a single day, most of them leaving nonsense comments just to see if they could overrun the servers – which they did not! Let’s hear it for DownTownHost!).

Project Mai Tai is also breaking some records in the feed sub department. Traffic is increasing a little bit, and I’m gaining inbounds that’ll serve me well down the line. By the way, am I the only one who thinks FeedBurner is way low on some of its numbers? I’m the first to say when my sites aren’t doing well, or when I’m surprised by how well they’re doing, but this is the first time both sites made only a modest gain out of the sort of traffic that has, in the past, given me much better feed numbers? Looking at Feedburner’s specifics, I see they don’t count the same services every day, which might mean they rely on services to report accurately, and therefore can only be as accurate as the reporting they get. Ah, well – it still seems to work as far as comparing two sites goes.

My next quest: figure out how to Digg-proof Wordpress without using caches. I’m sick to death of caching software. Yes, it’s awesome – the server doesn’t even burp – but it also caches ads, which is just not good. It also causes post edits and style changes not to show up quickly unless you manually delete the cache – which is not something my contributors on B-2 can do. And finally, it can cause people to miss each other’s comments and interrupt the flow of good discussions. I found this article on speeding up Wordpress without a cache, but the only way I can know if it works is to disable WP-Super-Cache, implement that solution, then find out the hard way if it doesn’t work the next time I get tons of traffic. Anybody know anything about this? Will that guy’s solution Digg-proof a WP install?

1. Project Mai Tai – Digg Traffic
2. Stirring the shit storm to bring traffic
3. Developing a blog audience that’s hungry for your content
4. Traffic increases without SEO
5. My first attempt at a Digg post

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