One of the biggest problems I face as a web developer is the horrible inconsistencies in how all the various browsers and versions display web sites. Really, someone should force them all to display the same way, but that will never happen. The alternative is to just write standards compliant code, pray, and test on a wide array of browsers. Currently, I check sites in Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 as well as FireFox 2 and 3 on the PC. On the Mac, I shoot for the latest FireFox and Safari versions. The only problem I had with that was not being able to test in the latest browsers on a Mac because my old iMac doesn’t support them. I’ll be buying a Mac Mini soon, but I needed something for right now and I wanted a solution that would also work for people who just develop one site or application and can’t afford to buy a new Mac just to test for a bit. That’s when I found Browsrcamp.
To be fair, my business partner found the site. It’ll take a snapshot of a website from a Mac’s perspective for free, or you can sign up for a weekly, monthly, or yearly plan to have direct VNC access to a Mac box running OS X. I picked up a month long access package for $19 via PayPal, downloaded RealVNC, installed and connected. The whole process took me about five minutes from choosing my account length to being on the Mac and browsing. It’s not the fastest connection, but it’s a huge upgrade from trying to guess my way through the code and load free snapshot after free snapshot.
The service is great for testing development, but what else could you use it for, I wondered. Immediately, I thought of my iPhone developer’s license. I paid $99 for it and haven’t been able to use it because I need a mac with OS X on it. It could be slow, but it just might work. And what about the .MOV video file I wanted to try un-corrupting. It can be done by editing the video file headers, but a lot of the software for that is Mac only. I’m sure I could come up with a couple other things, but I thought I’d let you chime in. What would YOU use a service like this for?
In January, Laptoplogic.com submitted a guest post and I posted it. Since then, the post has seen a tremendous amount of traffic, most of it from StumbleUpon.com. The traffic the post has been bringing has been a nice increase from my normal numbers and I’ve been enjoying it. Yesterday was a whole new ball game.
What happened?
Yesterday morning, I was running through my morning routine, which includes a visit to by blog admin area to delete spam and approve valid comments, but it didn’t come up. Whenever this happens, my stomach turns just a little, then I check things out to see how bad it is. The first thing I do is SSH in and poke at logs, etc. This is what I saw:
Upon further inspection, I found that the server was trying to handle about 150 httpd requests per second. I looked at my stats page on MyBlogLog because there I can quickly see the source of a lot of traffic. The source was an article called “64 Things Every Geek Should Know“, which had over 1,200 diggs by time I saw it. The article linked to the guest post I mentioned above. It was the 5th of the 64 things.
Staying online
Keeping the site up was a bit of a struggle. I’m told that no single-server site can survive the “digg effect”, but I did everything I could to keep things going as smoothly as possible. Regardless, tons of people were met with database connection errors or just server timeouts as I tweaked whatever I could to make the server feed web pages to as many people as it could. At the peak of the traffic, I copied the popular post into a new static html page and redirected all traffic for that post. This was done to eliminate the overwhelming amount of MySQL database queries and additional http requests that were previously resulting from being within WordPress. This worked to some extent, but it just resulted in more people seeing less of the site and the server still struggled to keep up. With nothing more to do, I just monitored the server as best I could as I watched the article that linked to me hit the number two spot on the Digg.com homepage and surpass over 4,000 diggs pretty quickly.
Residual Effects
When an article hits the front page of Digg, a common side effect (on top of the surge of traffic) is a lot of inbound links from those Digg readers either on their own sites or in social media. For example, Guy Kawasaki posted the “64 Things” article link on his Twitter account with over 100,000 followers, it turned up in a tweet from @mashable (almost 500,000 followers), and according to Retweetist, he’s not the only one who tweeted it. In fact, according to Twitter’s real-time search, it’s been retweeted 20 times in just the last half hour. The numbers so far look like a little over 26,000 readers yesterday alone. That’s just a little more than my monthly unique reader count. Because I put the post in a flat html file without Google Analytics, I don’t have proper numbers for yesterday from Google, but I do have my local stats which show a clear rise in traffic:
To show the residual traffic effects, I’ll update this image tomorrow. So far, today’s traffic is looking way up still.
What I’ve learned
There’s one really important lesson I’ve learned from this, and it’s that I need to be much more prepared for the unexpected. This was just a link from a post that has hit the front page of digg. If it were an article on my site that hit the front page itself, the results would have been catastrophic to manage. As it is, the traffic received was far more than my server was prepared for. To prepare, I must find an appropriate solution that lets me still maintain just the one server (more than enough for normal operations), but that can somehow immediately live up to the performance needs of the Digg effect when it happens. My first thought was something like Aptana’s Cloud, but I want to talk to my current host first and feel out my options.
One of the smartest services to be offered on the internet was NetFlix, so it amazes me just a bit that the idea wasn’t translated to audio books sooner. But you know how the saying goes… Better late than never.
A service for me, too BooksFree.com was introduced to me recently and I thought, “what a great idea… for other people.” I only say that to make a point. I don’t read much. I used to, but I’m so busy these days that I mostly only make time for books that involve instruction and computing. Still, I found myself searching through the audio books and found something I was eager to receive. Something else occurred to me only after my selection arrived. An audio book is much easier to enjoy while writing code or working on graphics than a paperback. My hands and eyes were freed up for work while I listened and I found a new respect for audio books.
Signing up, selecting, ordering
Even though I was testing with a free month in order to write this review, I had a charge on my credit card because my discount code was invalid or I wrote the wrong one down, perhaps. Not only was I able to call the company, which is less and less an option these days, but the problem was not one for long. The first person I spoke with transferred me to someone else who quickly resolved the problem. It felt like a small company which is refreshing when you just need a small mistake fixed quickly. Anyway, beyond that, my signup process was pretty quick and easy. The process involved three basic steps. The first is to choose the plan that fits your reading/listening needs and budget.
Once your choice is made, they throw a form at you. It’s really not that bad, though. For the most part, this is just all your shipping and billing addresses, name, any special discount codes, username and password, etc. I had this one filled out in about a minute.
The last step to get all signed up was to enter in my credit card information and agree to the terms of service.
Using the service to get and return books
Once I had an account set up, using the service was a little frustrating at first, only because I kept searching for stuff that I’m guessing doesn’t exist as an audio book like any of the O’Reilly stuff. It makes sense but like I said, that’s mostly all I read. Eventually, I searched for Douglas Adams, which brought back all of his books that I’ve read and a few more selections. I searched and tried browsing for other stuff. Browsing is not as useful as the search, but I find that true for most product-centric sites.
After picking out the original, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I waited for it to show up and within a few days, it was in my mail box. As I mentioned before, I found that I could easily listen and write code at the same time, so I was able to get through the whole thing rather quickly. A few days after pulling the CDs out of the packaging, I put them right back in, re-sealed it, and dropped it in the mail. A few more days, and I received an email to let me know it was safely back at BooksFree.com.
Is it worth the price?
In America, there’s no doubt that the economy is hurting and most people are keeping a tighter grip on their money. In such an economy, will a service like this do well? The fact is that there are lots of luxury items and services still doing just fine in our economy, and this could very well be one of them. The trick is to offer something that is still valuable enough to the consumer that they’ll opt to keep it over some other luxury when trimming the fat from their spending. And it doesn’t hurt if the cost is tempting. Originally, I was wondering why I’d ever want to pay $23 for one book a month. It’s the one-at-a-time plan, but I assumed that with shipping and the time to enjoy the book, etc., I’d only ever get one book a month out of the deal. Assumptions are often wrong, which is why I wanted to actually get and return a book. For me, the whole process, including enjoying the book, ate up about nine days. If you wanted to, then, you could probably get 3 books a month out of the deal, making the rentals cost about $7.50 per book to rent. Of course, moving up to the two-at-a-time plan for $27.49, you could probably enjoy 6 books per month for about $4.58 each. Additionally, a family who all enjoys books could benefit quite a bit from the six-at-a-time price plan. It’s still not the most appealing idea when you could always pop into the library and check out books, but if the audio book selection is better, that might make a difference, as well as the obvious benefit of not having to leave the house. I like any service that makes things easier for me and I’ve already pointed out my new respect for audio books, but should you use the service? If the convenience is important and you like to enjoy more than a couple books per month, I think it’s worth a try.
By now, we all know the story of Ashton Kutcher‘s victory in his race to beat CNN to 1,000,000 Twitter followers. Ashton did this in a number of ways. He advertised, he rallied people with a grass roots mentality, and he put the charity spin on it. Ashton worked hard to get people behind his goal and it paid off.
Tonight, I got an email. Britney Spears is following me on Twitter. Really? Am I interesting to her? Most celebrities have a very disproportionate following/follower count because they just follow people who they really want to read. Not Britney. It seems she’s gotten the scent of the one million follower mark and she wants to join the exclusive club, too. It’s how she’s doing it that inspired me to write about it. Watch the video and see for yourself.
It looks as if Britney doesn’t want to take the chance that hard work could do the trick even though she’s only 5,000 away. Instead, it seems she’s taking advantage of the likelihood that if she follows a lot of people, a percentage will either auto-follow back or follow her just because it’s Britney and, well, she’s actually following them.
I’m not going to start one of those unfollow movements. It’s your account, so follow who you want. I really don’t care, to be honest. I decided to write about it, however, because it shows that with technology and an uncapped follow limit, you, too, can reach that coveted million mark.
I DO think you should all start a grass roots campaign to get me to the million mark, though. I’m only about 998,300 to go: @joetech
