Some lessons from the Maxwell issue

This is mostly techy, server-y stuff, so jump to the rest only if you don't want to discuss what Maxwell said or how Universal Hub broke the story. There are plenty of other places for that.

But first, to everybody who declared a blog crush on me yesterday: Aww, thanks! That is just so cool. Actually, thanks to everybody who made intelligent comments, on both sides of the issue. As for the folks whose comments were basically to tell me just how big a pussy I am: Dudes, first enroll in an anger-management class. Then join Toastmasters. They'll help you learn to make arguments that somebody might actually pay attention to.

Yesterday, traffic on Universal Hub was a bit more than twice what I'd normally see on a Wednesday. Pretty sweet, although the record is still the tripling of traffic I saw for two days at the height of the mooninite nonsense.

To be sure, a good part of that is due to Glenn Ordway repeatedly broadcasting the site address (thanks Glenn!), but the single largest source of page views was from a place I'd never even heard of before: The Boston Celtics Blog on AOL. It must have some readership - I saw more than 2,000 page views coming from there.

Ad revenue did not go up at all, but that's typical for this sort of traffic spike - people are coming here to see one specific thing, not browse. Maybe if I ran ads that paid per impression (i.e., I get paid when they're displayed, even if nobody clicks on them), but, really, how often does something like this come along? One indicator of how many people were coming here just because of the Maxwell thing: Normally, slightly more than half of UH traffic comes from repeat visitors (this is a wonderful thing, so thanks!); yesterday, that was down to about 25%.

As for 'EEI listeners, I guess they do know how to use computers. At one point, so many of them tried to hit the site at once, it overloaded and crashed (just as I was dialing into my Web host's support line, in fact). This actually turned out to be a good thing - it basically reset everything and let me get onto the server and do some things to let it serve up more pages (like taking down the left and right sidebars, which are relatively database intensive).

But I need to react faster. When I first heard that Ordway was giving me free advertising (thanks for your e-mail, Jason!), I was still able to get onto the server. At that point, I should have concentrated on stuff such as increasing the cache time (normally, UH basically refreshes its pages for non-logged-in users every three minutes; I should've increased that to 10 or 15), pulling down parts of the site that are non-essential (such as the ads, some of which are served up by an application on the server), even temporarily suspending the Wicked Good Conference, which is a fairly low-volume site, but which consumes a fair amount of CPU resources for some reason. Instead, I posted a snippy comment about Glenn Ordway. And then couldn't get back onto the site until it crashed 20 or 25 minutes later.