The World of Stuff .com

Delicioused

My inbox was busy today. Earlier this afternoon, I got a notice from my web host saying that the balance in my account was down to $1. I didn’t think much of it; I get charged for bandwidth and storage (usually around 10¢ per day), and then I make another deposit, and the cycle continues. I also got a large number of e-mails (3) about The Dvorak Keyboard and You, but I didn’t think much of that either. After coming home from dinner this evening, I put two and two together. I had another e-mail from my web host in my inbox: my balance had gone down to 50¢ in less than 5 hours. I was being Slashdotted. Or Dugg. Or attacked. Or something.

Immediately, I checked my bandwidth and storage stats. Today’s bandwidth use was about 10 times the average, and my storage was also climbing high. I combed through the latest access logs, and it didn’t take me long before I saw that lots of hits were coming to The Dvorak Keyboard and You from del.icio.us and reddit, two very popular web sites. The page has also been mentioned on a thread on Fark. It seems that there have been so many hits that my access log was causing the drastic increase in storage.

I had to act, and fast. It sounds cheesy, but it’s true. I made an emergency payment which should be enough. I could have bought bandwidth in bulk, but I don’t think the influx of hits will last long enough to warrant that. I just needed to keep my balance from hitting $0, at which time the site would be disabled. We wouldn’t want that to happen, now would we? I’d get even more e-mails about the site being down, and I’d be like, “I know, guys.” Unless, by chance, I didn’t happen to check my e-mail after dinner tonight, in which case I’d be in for a nasty surprise come morning.

As of this writing, The Dvorak Keyboard and You is #12 on the front page of del.icio.us, #31 on reddit, which puts it on page 2, and #2 in reddit’s programming category. And the question is: why? The Dvorak Keyboard and You has long been bookmarked by del.icio.us readers, and only now is it enjoying its fifteen minutes. That’s just the way the web works, I guess. The wisdom of crowds.

So, to you new readers that I’ve tried to lure in from the Dvorak page… welcome… if there are any of you, that is. (If you just found my site from the Dvorak page, post a comment and say hello!) I usually don’t blog about my site very much, although I do have a category for it. Usually I talk about my life, and people think it’s cool and/or entertaining, so they stick around. Okay, now what’s something interesting that’s happened to me in the past few days? Well, I was planning on asking a girl out on what would be my first date. Yeah, say what you want; everyone else has. (Actually, they haven’t.) Stay tuned as this story unfolds.

Then I usually have a few links that I think are interesting. Here’s the first one: Wikipedia’s list of film sequels by box-office improvement. Apparently a lot of sequels actually make more money than their predecessors.

Fine Art Taco Photography. And you thought this site was weird.

Regular readers: Am I crazy for assuming that so many new visitors are going to be reading this? What if they’re not? That could be kind of embarrassing, but I can’t say it hasn’t happened before.