digg, Gravatar and Mint 
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digg
I’m sure many of you have heard of and use digg. If not:
What is digg?
Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.
Once a story is submitted by a user it is instantly posted in the digg area queue. This is a temporary holding place where stories wait to be promoted to the homepage. To help promote stories to the homepage, simply visit the digg area and digg stories you think are cool. Once a story has received enough diggs, it is instantly promoted. Should the story not receive enough diggs, or is reported, it eventually falls out of the digg area queue. Digg works because a large group of people actively promote good stories to the homepage. Since this site’s content is user-driven, it is up to YOU to contribute.
I use it regularly to kill some time and to find good articles - there’s always loads of new stuff on there so I’m never disappointed.
Yesterday, I was idly wondering how much traffic an article submitted to digg would get, so I did the unthinkable and submitted one of my own: “Put your Mac to sleep by sending a text message”.
Twenty four hours later, my article had been dugg 677 times, had made it to the digg homepage and had directed just under 10,000 people to my site. Ten thousand people!! Up until then I’d been averaging about fifty a day.
I also got some positive comments about the article itself along with a few “What’s the point?” orientated comments.
All the attention rocketed the article to near the top of Gravatar’s “100 Most Popular Gravatar Enabled URLs”.
I won’t be submitting any more of my own articles, but I’ve added a “digg this” link to the end of all my posts in the hope that someone else may consider a future one worthy. I just hope my bandwidth can handle it …
Mint
My Mint installation did a flawless job of tracking all the incoming hits and visitors, letting me know which other sites had picked up my article and was sending traffic my way. My favourite plug-in (which are known as “Pepper”), Fresh View, had a dramatic transformation and the new influx of visitors increased the y-axis of the graph to never-before-seen heights:
That is cool, Timmy! I’m lucky if I get twenty visitors a day and that’s if I post in a forums so people notice my sig and link to my blog.
So 10,000 is unimaginable for me. I saw all the comments it generated. It’s a great post BTW. :^) - MHC
Oh and… Never mind the Windoze Club bouncers…. - MHC
Thanks MHC. And thanks for the email with the links to the psychedelic stuff, too! - Timmargh
Whoah! Timmy! Another nice overhaul!!! Congrats, great success!!! :^D - MHC
Thanks MHC - just a colour change and a slightly different header.
I want to add a Choose your colour scheme option but I can’t figure out how. - Timmargh
Wow! That would be terrific eye candy! I’ll google in a little while for this and if I find anything I’ll send it to you. :^) - MHC
This might be what you need: How do you make a website skinnable?
Hope this is the solution for you, Timmy! :^) - MHC
Whoah! You got it to work! Nifty kewl, Tim! :^) - MHC
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