Mike Little’s Journalized

Wow! I hit the front page of Digg.com about 20 hours ago, for an old posting. The piece is one I wrote back in September about new features in Gmail only being available in the US English version.
With the new Chat feature now released I guess some people were searching to find out why they didn’t have it. They found me, and Digg user Gurgle dugg me.

Ironically, I didn’t find out about it until mid afternoon because GMail is being really slow at putting mail in my inbox. My statistics package mails me every 100 unique visitors. Around 1:30 this afternoon, I received over 50 of these emails all showing in GMail as having been sent “8 hours ago”. I looked and saw that most of them were around 5 minutes apart! I checked my stats package and saw the spike!
(click for larger view). You can see from the hourly chart that for the hour of 5am GMT I got over 1100 visitors!
The visitors bar chart for the month has yesterday sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb!
(click for larger image).
In all I had just over 10,000 unique visits yesterday: over 7 times the current average! I’m pleased to say the server held up well. Partly thanks, I’m sure, to Ricardo Galli’s WP-Cache plugin. My Webalizer stats are showing 17,000 visits for the domain as a whole yesterday (264,000 file hits), almost 3GB of bandwidth. My last hosting arrangement would have ground to a halt in less than 15 minutes!