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Digg effect passed, Camera Hacker now seeing Lifehacker traffic

If you were surfing on the Camera Hacker web site this weekend, you missed a huge over-crowd, which may be a good or bad thing depending on the time of your visit. A fan posted a story about the many Camera Hacker Hacks on Digg, a popular "technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control", several days ago. The story did not get picked up at first.

But when I turned my backs to the web site on Saturday morning, the story gained momentum and hit the front page on Digg. Within minutes, Digg visitors swarmed the "Hacks" index page and saturated the Camera Hacker web site bandwidth. In order to meet the demand, images on the index pages were disabled with a message that read, "Due to the Digg effect today, photos on this index page are temporarily disabled", on top of the pages in red.

The interim solution was successful at reducing the network load and providing enough supply for the demand. Camera Hacker web site was successful at fighting off the Digg effect that plagued many other web sites. (Now we just have to keep our finger crossed in case of a Slashdot effect.) We saw a huge jump in page counts that day, minus the page counts missed due to network timeouts. Just as quickly as the Digg story was posted to the front page on Saturday, it mysteriously disappeared off the Digg web site on Sunday. It's an interesting phenomenon that we still can't make head or tail out of.

Today, I noticed that the Camera Hacker web site is featured on Lifehacker, a weblog published by Gawker Media. And traffic has picked up again. But this time around, the web site is sustaining the network load even with the images enabled. I will continue to monitor traffic and make sure the load is sustainable, before disabling image again on the index pages.

At its inception, Camera Hacker was a personal home page that grew bigger and bigger. After catering to photographic enthusiasts all over the world for eight years, the index pages just kept getting longer with interesting new articles. I had thought about the network demands, which the photos on the index pages would create, long before the Digg spike. Several concepts had been on the drawing board, but I have only taken small steps. One such concept was to divide each of the index pages into sub-index pages by category, like the way many popular portals are organized. With the recent increase in demand, I may very well do that.

Chieh Cheng
Mon, 6 Feb 2006 12:56:56 -0800

Well, folks, as of the last half-hour, the Digg effect is back. Kevin Rose, the creator of Digg, posted a story to the Lifehack story on the Camera Hacker web site. So, once again, I temporarily disabled the photos on the index pages.

I do welcome all the new visitors. Our community of photography enthusiasts may grow bigger in the near future. Change is good.

Chieh Cheng
Mon, 6 Feb 2006 16:57:02 -0800

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• Digg From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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• What is Camera Hacker "Digging"?

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