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 »

I see more and more fading corners every day, so I decided to put together some freebies, since they are becoming popular.

You will notice that all of these are white, but I included a Photoshop source file in each download so you can customize them. It seems to me that a lot of people are looking for these so, I thought I would do a good deed and help everyone out.

I tried to mix up the sizes a bit by making 2 different corner radii, as well as vertical, horizontal, and 2 border styles. If you like what you see here, and you absolutely do not have a way to customize it, leave a comment and specify a color in hex format, and I’ll see what I can do.

Read the rest of this entry »

Who needs 4 round corners when you can have 1 or 2 that fade into oblivion?

There are a few reasons why this is not only kinda cool, but also a good idea for optimizing your site or blog:

1. It just looks cool.

2. It effectively separates content and keeps load times down because the background only loads once and doesn’t repeat.

3. It gives you freedom in your layout. Having a border that fades into your background enables you to leave the height and/or width of the column up to the content. For example, if you have a fading corner on the each section of the sidebar in your blog, you can add as many links as you want into that section and your CSS only loads one background image.

Read the rest of this entry »