First of all, I would like to take this opportunity to WELCOME all the new readers and subscribers of Knowliz. At the same time THANK the existing readers who read this blog regularly through RSS and/or email.
You might have noticed that recently one article of Knowliz appeared on Digg front page and the top entry in many categories like Technology => Linux/Unix and Technology => Popular (24 Hours).
The article which appeared is:
(20 Things to do after installing Ubuntu)
At the time of writing this article has received 1337 Diggs.
The Digg Effect:
This was my first time when something got so popular that it reached Digg, Delicious and Popurls front page. Obviously I started tracking all those visits and diggs.
The digg effect was like 250-300 people were always on the page. Everytime I refreshed the page, the diggs increased by 20 or something and so the traffic also increased.
The Statcounter statics showed me that the number of visitor on that particular day reached well over 40,000. All visits on that page was either coming from Digg or StumbleUpon. Thanks to all of you who made it possible.
Lessons Learnt:
Though the traffic increased like anything, but there were some really bad comments about the page on Digg. Lot of those who commented mentioned about very slow loading of page, high CPU usage etc. Some of them even said that the site SUCKS.
Some comments on the posts provided wrong or misleading information provided by ANONYMOUS people.
Obviously it was something to look upon and correct as soon as possible. I am not a web designer and hence do not know much about it. But I can customize the template to suit my purpose. So did I. The following are some of the changes I have done on this blog.
- I removed lot of Javascript from my blog.
- It looks like there was something wrong with the previous theme, so I have changed it. Hopefully, you like it better now.
- Some of you have mentioned that white text on black background was very hard to read or at least it was stressful for the eyes. So now, it is white background with black text on it.
- I have removed lots of unnecessary links from the sidebar.
- It is a clean minimal theme, but I am still working on it to improve the performance. Your suggestions are most welcome.
- I have removed the text link advertisement, may be it was one of thing which affects the loading time. But I am still experimenting. I will definitely welcome some expert comment on it.
- Other than that, I will be extra cautious about anonymous comments on this blog. With anonymous comments enabled, people sometimes give wrong advice. So in readers interest, I have to be cautious and sometimes, may be delete some anonymous comments. Let me know your views about it.
So these are some of the changes. Hopefully, it creates a better experience for you when you visit my blog. I always appreciate my readers feedback.
Once again I really appreciate all these Diggs and comments that made this blog a little popular.
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after having been on the frontpage of digg once before i faced the same issues…i’m all about optimizing my site, but you can’t please everyone, especially in terms of styling…
-stumbler
Thanks a lot for this insight.
nice theme you have here. Oh my digg and SU been hack by hackers. Even my photobucket and twitter. I only manage to get back twitter, photobucket the password cant be change at all.
oh about the copyright issue,I am not familiar with that.
impressive stats!! take note my friend — to date in digg/tech/linux or unix, your post in number 2 in the last 7 days; number 6 in the last 30! delicious and popURLs front pages eh? way to go ^_^
i like the lesson learnt idea as this would serve as a guide for digg front pagers’ hopefuls. i like the list you have gathered to improve the website speed because they were mainly based on xp. this makes the tips more effective on a personal level ^_^
congrats again and continue posting especially helpful contents! ^_^