If you’re not using del.icio.us go get into your car and drive into something stationary. It’s a must for all geeks.

I’m moving from my current host soon and going to a new setup. Rather than hosting with one of the standard companies and leasing one of their dedicated systems, I’m getting my own server and colo’ing it at a company administered by a friend of mine.

This is the final stage in my website’s evolution, and while it’s going to be somewhat expensive I’m going to try and offset some of the cost by putting ads back on the site. I’m hoping I can, without any effort, reach the $100 cuttoff for Google Ads and get that money to put toward the cost of the solution.

Plus, having ads on the site actually lends to credibility I’ve found. People subconsciously associate a strip of ads with the site being “professional”. Strange but true.

The Server

• CPU(s): Two Dual-Core Zeons at 1.6Ghz, 4MB Cache
• Memory: 4GB
• Drives: Two 36GB, 15,000rpm SAS Drives in RAID1 (PERC Controller)

That’s four (4) processor cores — each with a gig of RAM. I’m giddy about it, and I can’t wait to get it online with all my content swapped over. It was cheap as hell, too. I priced the same thing through IBM and it was out of control. Plus, the monthly payment model is good considering that’s how you take in ad revenue.

The main goal of the move is to be able to survive the Digg Effect so that every month or so I can get slammed with traffic and avoid seeing comments like, “The site’s already down.” That’s just embarrassing.

I am also going to step up my efforts at content creation and organization. I have dozens of ideas for good study articles just waiting to be written and published. My Unix/Linux commands section is especially bare and I have a few commands that I can’t wait to write about.

New Approach

Overall I just want to refocus my efforts on my /study page. I’m not so much interested in the /writing area right now. I want to stay centered around creating high quality content that summarizes complex material. It’s the approach that benefits me the most because I end up farily versed in the stuff that interests me.

It’s also the most rewarding because people seem to enjoy that content the most, and they voice this approval either through private emails or through the social bookmarking sites.

Anyway, change is on the way. I’m hoping to see all aspects of the site’s quality head skyward.

I just got pwned by the Digg effect — for like 15 hours — and I’m still unsure of where the bottleneck was.

Was it MYSQL? Was it Apache? I need to do some research. If it’s my host I’m going to pummel them, and if it’s inefficient code on my server, then I’m going to rectify that. I do know that I could still ping my site while the website was down. I could still SSH to it as well, and get mail.

I’m thinking it has to be AMP based. So embarrassing…I pay good money for a dedicated server, and I should to be able to withstand a Digg effect better than this. This can’t happen again.

If anyone’s a guru on optimizing servers to withstand traffic onslaughts, let me know.

There’s a problem with Reddit and Digg, but it’s not what you’ve been hearing. It’s not the spammers, and it’s not the voting systems. The real issue is that people don’t know the difference between legitimate promoting of one’s own original content and blogwhoring or blogspamming.

Most think blogspamming is when you repeatedly post links to your own original content, hosted on your own website. But that’s not it; blogspamming is when you take someone else’s content, put it on your site, and then post the link to YOUR page instead of the original source. It’s truly disgusting behavior.

The difference is massive, and the survival of sites like Reddit depends directly on people understanding this.

The Idea Bazaar

The Internet’s most beautiful trait is its ability to rapidly propagate good ideas, regardless of source. It’s much like a traditional, open marketplace where people bring the pottery, clothing, woodwork, etc. and ask their peers to look at it. Or, even better, it’s like open-mic night in front of billions of people.

Hello, everyone. This is a poem I’ve written. Or here’s a short story I just finished. I hope you like it…

This is what the Internet’s about, and I think Digg and Reddit should be more open to this philosophy. We shouldn’t penalize people for offering their own original content to the world.

Writers submit their work to publishers; they don’t wait for it to be found. Artisans have shows and invite lots of people. Academics submit to their respective journals. Submitting original content for peer review is an absolute must in a society that values progress.

Sites that are based on a constant influx of quality content need to adopt a mantra of judging offerings based on only two things: originality and merit. Any would-be resource that fails to grasp this (or later forgets it) is doomed to fail.

– [And yes, it's pretty obvious from the post that this has happened to me before, but this isn't a bitterness issue. I speak partly because I'm guilty of it too -- being quick to judge based on things other than content.]

It appears that this movie has become an instant cult classic. Thanks to Dylan for the heads up.

I made it to the front page of Digg yesterday for the first time — very exciting stuff. What’s not so exciting is that my web server was not available for the few hours that it was being obliterated by Digg users. I can’t imagine how many tried to see the article but weren’t able to while my server was reduced to a foul-smelling liquid.

Anyway, I’ll be taking a look at the logs to see what the bottleneck was: apache, the database, bandwidth, or some combination of the three. Looks like I may be in for an upgrade to the server, assuming it’s not cost prohibitive. But first I have to find out which piece took the beating…

Dude, what the hell is this myspace thing? I have gone from hearing about it once a couple of weeks ago to like three times a day — from completely unrelated sources.

One particularly poignant comment on how powerful this movement is:

“It’s so big that most of your friends are probably already on it. If you’re not, you’re one of the last ones.”

I didn’t believe that until I found out all my friends were on myspace — and I wasn’t.

Alas, I already have a blog and I’m not doing another one. If the cool people want to link to me they can use an href.

If you’re like me, you’re constantly battling two conflicting urges — the urge to add more RSS feeds (and hence supposedly gain more knowledge), and the urge to trim them down so you can be more GTD-like, i.e. “reduce the inputs”.

In addition to taking my news in more efficiently, one thing that’s helped me do both at the same time is electing to go with what I call “meta-feeds”. Metafeeds I describe as feeds that collect content from multiple high-quality, semi-diverse sources. That’s pretty loose, but it’s different enough from a standard, single-source feed (like for CNN) to be a useful term.

If you truly care about your time you’ll try to find as many of these feeds as possible. Doing so will decrease the amount of time you spend reading and simultaneously increase the amount of good content you get from the time you do spend.

The way this works is simple — you don’t need to read every single story on the Internet in order to digest a full day of news. Instead, rely on people who do read every single story. Here are 5 RSS feeds that could (if you were to take the leap of faith required) likely allow you to dump a good portion of your other feeds:

1. Populicio.us
2. Digg
3. Reddit

Here we have the most bookmarked sites by the geek elite with Populicio.us and Digg, and an absolutely astounding list of diverse content via Reddit. The key here is that someone else already did the work for you. You reap the benefits by seeing pre-filtered goodness. If something makes an impression on Slashdot or Lifehacker, or Boing Boing, it’s probably going to make it to one of the sites above.

Ultimately, one of the best approaches to being more efficient online is learning to “let go”. It’s realizing that you don’t have to get everything. Tools like the sites above allow you to spend more time hacking on your projects rather than obsessing over which big story you missed. If the story was that important someone’s going to talk about it and it’ll probably hit one of the sites above.

Trim the 15 sites down to 3, relax, and get back to what’s important.:

I was looking for a bookmark of mine on delicious a moment ago and did so in a very primitive way — I went to my delicious page and typed my query into the search field.

Well, it dawned on me that there’s a much better way to do this. After remembering that I use Firefox Quicksearches to make my searching tasks more efficient, I went back to my delicious page and simply right-clicked in the search field, elected to create a new quicksearch, and gave it the quicksearch keyword ‘d’. This lets me do this:

d screenshot

…which yields the link on how to take a screenshot in OS X. The key here is that I just searched all of my own custom bookmarks — all of which I added tags and wrote a description for. This is so powerful because I have already narrowed down what I find interesting on my delicious page. Now, using this technique, I can search within that highly distilled list of resources directly from the address bar.

It Gets Crazier

While searching my own links is likely to be most useful, a friend of mine and I instantly realized that this should be extended to the uber-powerful ability to search the delicious/tags option. This, for anyone not familiar, let’s you search for results bearing a particular tag name, i.e. dogs, pictures, etc.

The thing that makes this so powerful is the ability to combine tags to really bring out specific results. You can search for programming+xml, for example, and get back a list of results that have both the programming AND xml tags applied across the entire delicious userbase. Very cool stuff.

Well, let’s add a quicksearch for this functionality and make it possible to yield this godlike power directly from the Firefox address bar. First, go to the delicious tags page. Then right-click in that search field and create another quicksearch. I gave mine the dt keyword. This lets us do this:

dt linux security

Uber-sick. You can, of course, combine tags for searches within your own links using this same method, like so:

d programming css

It’s quite powerful and I’m sure I’ll use it almost every day. Hopefully someone else will get some use out of it as well.