Yes, Digg produces the majority of the traffic resulting from a front page Digg story, but is Digg the only reason servers bite the dust when a story is popular on Digg? Or are Digg Leechers helping out?

When a story makes it to the front page of Digg, the result is a feeding frenzy of readers from across the planet trying to access the stories contents. The result, often times is too much traffic for the unsuspecting site of the original story, and quite frequently the server goes down, AKA the Digg effect. But how much of the blame should Digg really take for all these spontaneous server bombs? I’ve seen numerous stories hit the front page of Digg, and show up within minutes on a variety of other sites that leech stories from digg’s front page.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comment Jewels: Where the Real help is at.

In the world of social media sites, and the blogosphere, I’m sure you’ve read your fair share of very helpful stories. There are tons of helpful blog posts, tutorials, and stories out there, but if you don’t read the comments posted at the bottom of these posts, you may be passing up a treasure chest of helpful information. There are many reasons why a story will recieve a comment, and equally as many types of comments as reasons. However, the blogosphere has a unique characteristic that I have come to enjoy very much, and pay close attention to: Random Acts of Kindness hidden away in comments.

Read the rest of this entry »

Finding your old stories with Digg’s Search vs. Google. Guess who wins?

Some of you already know this, but if you don’t it will save you a lot of time. Digg’s Search Could use some improvements, I try looking up old stories I’ve Dugg, and end up using Google instead, almost every time. I use Digg on a daily basis, not only to read interesting stories and important news, but sometimes to look up an old story I Dugg and reap its benefits. Most of the time, I’m looking up an old story to find a link to a free download I found on Digg while I was at work and want it at home, or a Photoshop tutorial, CSS tips, etc. Useful stuff. What bugs me is you can’t choose the time period or scope of your search at the top of the window. The default time period when you search from the top of page is the “Last 7 Days.” 99% of the times I search, I’m searching for an OLD story, imagine that. If I wanted to find a story from the past 7 days, it would be a lot easier to find, and I might not even need to use the search, especially if it was a popular story. Some of you may think this is ridiculous, but for those of us who digg a large amount of stories, a search feature should be the easiest way to find dugg stories. In Digg.com’s case this just simply isn’t true.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a very simple way to achieve the “fading corner” look with 2 small background images, the trick is setting it up right in your graphics editor.

There are only 2 images used in this example. A background gradient (repeated-x), and a background image for the top of the content container. The background image for the content is necessary in order to get the rounded corners. The reason this method works is because you can set the color of your page background gradient to fade into the color of your content container or wrapper.

Example:

Read the rest of this entry »

Due to the responses to “Free Fading Corner Images”, I will cover how to use a fading corner with CSS.

Simple Method:

I’ve found that the simplest way to do this by using a single div with the fading corner as a background image that doesn’t repeat. Make sure in your css that you set the background image to no-repeat, and place it in the top left. I also put a 20px left padding on the content in the div.

Read the rest of this entry »