Super Ginormous

Day: December 8, 2006

  • Ripple

    It started with a simple post on Digg – “New Apple.com Design Coming”. (It has 1253 diggs as of right now.) A user reportedly found a design on someone’s site and posted it to Digg.com saying: “I found this image from desudesu.com. ‘It’s design test for Fantasy Interactive for the next generation of apple.com site’ says the caption. It looks quite great to me.”

    I caught it early, under Upcoming Stories,  before it even made it to the homepage. I posted the first comment:

    Looks nice, but I’m going to have to call BS. A “design test” doesn’t mean, “this is the new design for apple.com”. They probably asked the guy to submit a concept for a site he’d love to redesign.
    Sorry, no digg.

    All’s well and fine, right?

    Enter Kyle Neal of Warpspire.com. I subscribe to his feed (mainly because I’m interested in his work on Hemingway), and noticed a post from him within an hour: Spotting a fake: “New apple design”. Evidently, someone else noticed it too, because the story got Dugg. (Since yesterday, his post has received 1100 diggs.) Some of that traffic ended up bleeding over to my site because I had posted in the comments.

    I mention all of this, because yesterday I had double the amount of traffic (102 unique visitors) to my site than my previous high (56 visitors). (Yeah, I realize those aren’t real impressive numbers.) When you consider that my site doesn’t get a lot of traffic at all (maybe 30-35 unique visitors a day), this spike is pretty significant. People are always looking for ways to drive more traffic to their site, but sometimes all it takes is to get involved in a discussion. I’m sure Kyle’s site experienced a lot more traffic than that… but it’s interesting that the Digg effect rippled over to my own site to some extent.

    I use this site mainly for testing. I blog from time to time (fairly irregularly, I might add). But I’ve been able to boost my Google PageRank to a PR4 by continually gettting in on the discussion, whether it’s on Digg, Warpspire or any other number of sites. So if you’re looking for a good, legitimate way to drive traffic to your site, get involved, say something worthwhile, and people will take note.

  • Thirsty

    Full Throttle Family

    Lately I’ve been on an energy drink kick. If I had to choose a favorite, I’d probably say Full Throttle and its’ two other flavors, Blue Demon and Fury, would be it. (Sonic’s Full Throttle Fury Slush is awesome, BTW.) But I digress, that’s not really what I wanted to post about.

    At home, I drink a concoction that could be described as “Mud”, “Dirty Water”, “Dirty Toilet Water”, etc. It looks disgusting. Because the color of the beverage is a very – umm – odd-looking shade of brown. What is this odd concoction? It’s 50% Orange Juice, 50% Pepsi (or a cola of your choice). I’m not quite sure when or where I picked up the idea for this drink, but I love it. My wife, on the other hand, nearly gags everytime she sees me drink it. (And she didn’t appreciate how much Tyler seemed to like it either.) I’ll try to post a picture of it later. If I had thought about it, I would have snapped one last night while I was drinking it…

    I suppose it goes back to when I was a kid, when me and my brothers would mix “Suicides” together at fast food places. In Germany, we called them Mezzo Mixes, because Fanta actually had a soda out that was a combination of several soda flavors called a Mezzo Mix. Depending on my mood, I’ll mix most sodas together… Orange Fanta, Coke, and Sprite is a personal favorite, with Fruit Punch and Coke a close second. Funny thing is, the last time I ate at a Burger King I noticed something odd at their beverage counter… They have drink recipes decals on the soda dispensers! Mix 1 part X with 1 part Y and it makes Z. And here I thought I was the only sicko that enjoyed mixing it up a bit.

    What kind of weird drinks do you like?

    Speaking of beverages – check this out.