I have been rumbled and stumbled
Grandad October 13th, 2007
I have hit the big time, and I don’t know how or why.
This site has been going ballistic for the last few days. I have had more visitors since Thursday than in all of last year.
It seems to be down to a thing called StumbleUpon. I didn’t know anything about that, so I checked their site. I expected a huge neon sign on their front page saying “Get your ass over to Head Rambles. It’s bleedin’ mighty“. But all they asked me to do was download a toolbar, which I did.
I have played around with my toolbar [!] and it just throws up random sites. Some of them are good, and some are not so good. But I can’t find myself in there.
So why are they all coming over? There must be something I’ve missed.
Does anyone know how it works?
I’m not complaining. I’m sure the people who look after my server are.
The one place I have noticed the results is in IrishBlogs.info. That’s the site that gives me the little number on my sidebar under the Archives. Normally I will languish around the 7 or 8 spot. On Thursday, I knocked Twenty off his perch, and shot up to 2.
In the overall rankings in IrishBlogs.info, I notice I have just knocked Michele of his perch, which takes some doing as he gets huge traffic. I’m currently at 8 [out of 720]. Of course, as soon as he reads this, he is going to reset all the figures back to zero, because he runs the site.
All of the visitors are heading for my article on ordering a pint of Guinness. What really p*sses me off is that I wrote that article just for my faithful few, so you wouldn’t get shot next time you visited Ireland. I look after my friends. But now thousands of people have read it.
The hunting season is going to be bad next year.
I just know it.
-oOo-
Hah! I hit the Number One spot.
Jealous b*st*rds reset the counters immediately after!!
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Will you leave my poor server alone, with all the CIA, NSA, and other Law enforcement places monitoring it, you don’t need stumble upon to keep your traffic stats up!
I didn’t do anything to start this. Honest. I haven’t a clue what’s going on…
Wow, all them bribes must have worked, eh?
It cost me a fortune.
Actually, I think I have found the guilty party who started it all.
Thanks Donncha!
It’s a pretty cool deal. You can change your settings to show you random websites in categories you like. Then if you see one you like you can flag it for others to look at.
It’s social surfing!
God Bless America
It seems to be quite popular all right. I must investigate it further….
God Save Ireland from America
You’re welcome! That was a great post!
My overgrown garden - Digg that!
Thanks, Donacha. You have made me happy, and the server very unhappy!
Sneezy - Why? Are you stumbling among the brambles?
Keep an eye on my blog, in a few days time I’ll be releasing a plugin that should take care of any server load ..
@donncha: I release plugins everyday, don’t you?
If I stuttered, please forgive me. (may be dup comment.)
@Donncha: I release plugins everyday.
Eh? that’s just silly!
God Bless America.
hmmmmmmm, I guess I have had my head shoved up my ass again by grandad!
Oh, the server is clogging…
WordPress
You are posting comments too quickly. Slow down.
hehehe - this is the most fun I’ve had since my nap.
Okay…things should be getting back to normal now. And, seemingly, no one’s the wiser. No, no -pleased to do it.
Wait ’til you see where you finish in November…
Stumbling around wordpress and found this: more than you probably want to know about StumbleUpon algorityhm.
http://ventureskills.wordpress.com/2007/09/19/stumbleupon-mathematics-for-stumblers/
Donncha - Don’t mind Sixty. He’s a senile fart from the States, and he has been mixing up his pills again. To understand his comment, you have to think along the lines of his younger cousin Twenty.
Sixty - Stoppit you old fool. You are overdoing the blue pills again.
[*rams Sixty's head back up his arse*]
Dan - They’re not. My log last night was 48Mb [that should give Sixty something to comment on..]. I’m getting warnings from my server now. But ‘pleased to do’ what? You have me confused.
Stumble, people see your site, they make a comment and say they like it. People with similar interests get directed to your site when they hit the stumble button on the toolbar. Thats how I ended up here. Great blog! Keep it up.
Thanks, Hennigan. It seems to work! I had more visitors in the first nine hours of today, than I’d normally get in two weeks!!
And thanks!
Stumble is how i found your site as well, and seeing as you are a perfect reminder of why i want to leave the states to travel europe I am going to become one of your ‘faithful few’. >which doesn’t seem to be so few any more!!!<
Stumble seems to be a fairly powerful traffic getter! Since the beginning of the month it has referred around 16,000 visitors!!
Welcome to the ‘faithful few’.
Yeah. You’re doing pretty well there, I notice. I’m not sure it’s due entirely to StumbleUpon though. I think I might have signed up for them a while back and it didn’t have that effect for me, so you must be doing something else right.
Hi Bock. I think it’s down to what I call the “Spice Girls Effect” - no substance, just flavour of the moment. I’ll be forgotten about in a few days time.
The Stumble is behind it, all right. In the last week, I have had 18,000 visitors from Stumble alone. But on top of that, various other sites and fora have shoved in a lot of traffic.
I did sign up with Stumble a long time ago, and then completely forgot about it. So it was nothing I did. Honest…..
Well, after that you could always consider posting a Bush video.
I wouldn’t lower myself!