Using the Digg API to Prepare your Site for the Digg Effect - Part 1
May 30, 2007 | Comments (3) | Filed under: Tools
As I mentioned before, I’ve been experimenting a bit with the new Digg API to see what exactly is possible with it. I’m not alone in this either. In just about a month since the API was released, literally hundreds of API based tools and products have been released all over the web. Just take a look at the finalists from the Digg API Visualization Contest for some of the crazy ideas people have come up with.
I’ve been really busy these days helping a friend of mine get ready to launch a small video website to showcase some of the graphic art talent at his school. While we were working on optimizing the site as best we can to withstand the Digg Effect, I had an interesting idea for a way to use the Digg API to automate a site to withstand the Digg Effect.
One of the hardest problems with a burst high traffic situation (where you get a massive influx of visitors over a short period of time) is that most sites are unprepared. Almost all of us sacrifice top level optimization of our blogs to provide more user luxuries such as recent post lists, MyBlogLog widgets, top commentator lists, etc. The problem with these is they require more database accesses, more JavaScript loading, and more CPU usage/memory to run. That’s fine in a situation where your traffic is spread throughout the day, but in a burst situation, it can eat up all your server resources and eventually cause it to crash.
The ideal situation would be to provide all the comforts of your site when traffic is balanced, but limit these functions for a short period of time as soon as you see your traffic beginning to spike. At least, that is, until you switch to a hosting situation that can handle both. The best way to survive this type of situation is to switch your page entirely to HTML only, as soon as you think your traffic is about to explode. This can be done manually, but sometimes people will submit your pages to Digg for you, and you can easily be surprised by the traffic.
So, my idea was that maybe it was possible to completely automate this functionality? One of my favorite plugins we use here at Bookmark Bliss is called WP-Cache. WP-Cache, in essence, converts your pages to HTML, automatically, and refreshes them both smartly (whenever you update or someone adds a comment) and periodically (every few hours). This has its limitations, but can really save your Wordpress blog when it comes to burst traffic.
What if your site isn’t using Wordpress though? This is the situation we are in with my friends video site, where we are basically deciding on how to implement our own caching scheme directly into the site.
It turns out the Digg API is VERY powerful and you can really accomplish a lot of great things with it. I really hope what we’ve done for the video site will translate into an improved Wordpress plugin as well, but for now I’m not quite sure.
In part two, I’ll step through our solution and how we completely automated the Digg survival process using the Digg API.
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I like wordpress so much that I’m using it for every type of site. The ‘hammer’ and ‘nail’ problem, I suppose. The nice thing is that you don’t HAVE to show posts. It makes for a pretty flexible tool!