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Nerdbucket takes a dive…

I apologize for the downtime today. Apparently this new plugin I got for wordpress, bookmarkify, did a lot more than I expected. I read some idiotic rant about how some dude went from no traffic to 2,000 hits in one day after installing a similar plugin. What an absurd little man, I thought to myself (ironic, really, as I’m only 5’6″ (that’s about 1.68 meters)).

For those who don’t know (and don’t want to follow the link), bookmarkify is what causes those little buttons to show up below my posts, allowing anybody to easily submit an article to any of the various social bookmarking sites: digg, reddit, dzone, etc.

In a 14-hour span today (skipping, of course, the four-hour downtime), I got over 1,600 unique visitors. Over 8,500 page views. (For the record, a typical day is around 50 uniques and 100-200 page views.)

I of course used bookmarkify to submit a couple links to a couple sites, but it was other people submitting other pages (and then further people voting) that really made this work. So, anonymous submitters of my crappy content, I thank you!

I’ve made some changes that will hopefully mitigate this problem, but I suspect I’ll need to find myself a caching system of some sort in the near future.

The next middle-class piracy article is still scheduled for Friday — I just wanted to explain what happened today.

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A new day, a new blogging app

Typo seems cool to us Ruby on Rails jerks. Because it’s Ruby on Rails. It has sexy live searching. Um… and like… did I mention it’s Ruby on Rails?

So… yeah. After the thing sucking time and again, and eating too much memory and having funny stability problems, I’ve given up. I have enough annoyances with Ruby on Rails apps (I truly hope mod_rails helps here – stay tuned for my upcoming first impressions) that I wrote myself – no need to make things worse with badly-built open source.

So here I am on WordPress. I’m willing to bet it’s just another badly-build open source app. The difference, though, is it’s been around the block, and seems to have some stability under the hood. It wasn’t written with the “do what’s cool right now!” approach – it has been more geared toward functionality. So as much as I despise PHP, I can’t deny that this app is much nicer to deal with than Typo ever was. Even the conversion of my old articles was about a 10 minute process, thanks to Will Bridges. And with some minor tweaks, I now have a (hopefully) nicer URL structure.

Yeah, I’ll lose some SEO in the mean time – major site change, loss of something like 50 old URLs, but hell, it’s time for something that isn’t a headache.