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title: "Digg Effect -  the day after"
content-type: article
timestamp: 1146794340
tags: "web20|webdevelopment|internet"
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<p>&#8230;So it turns out that my <a href="http://www.h3rald.com/articles/view/rails-inspired-php-frameworks/">last article</a> appeared on <a href="http://www.digg.com">Digg</a> homepage. <br />
This was quite a pleasant surprise: I didn&#8217;t expect that an article submitted to <em>my own site</em> could make it that far! I thought you&#8217;d need a relatively well-known website, mafia&#8217;s support, some divine intervention and a terrific amount of luck, but it seems that sometimes an interesting article about an interesting subject can be enough. I&#8217;ll probably write a more detailed report of what happened soon, in another article rather than a blog post, but for now I just wanted to post a short summary here.</p>
<p>Two days ago I decided to write a roundup of the six Rails-inspired <span class="caps">PHP</span> frameworks, CakePHP, Symfony, <span class="caps">PHP</span> on Trax, Code Igniter, Biscuit and Pipeline. The reason for this was that I couldn&#8217;t find anything comparing all of them and such comparison could have been useful for some new <em>bakers_. OK, I confess, when I started writing the article I thought I&#8217;d submit it to Digg and see what happens: I saw that another <a href="http://www.phpit.net/article/ten-different-php-frameworks/">roundup</a> made it to the first page and people were quoting it everywhere on the net. It&#8217;s a nice article, but &#8211; in my humble opinion &#8211; not too exhaustive. <br />
Then I read a comment by someone to the <a href="http://digg.com/programming/CakePHP_1.0_has_been_released">digg</a></em> of the latest Cake release stating:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Yes, they are similar &#8211; both were inspired by Rails, but Cake has gone further to differentiate themselves. Here&#8217;s a decent (but not great) overview of some frameworks: http://www.phpit.net/article/ten-different-php-frameworks/</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At that point, I thought that another round up, perhaps more Cake-centric, was in order. The other reason was that in one of my recent <a href="http://www.h3rald.com/blog/view/23/">blog posts</a> I tried to compare CakePHP and Symfony, but obviously my emotions got in the way and in the end I noticed I was kinda <em>attacking</em> Symfony. That was a blog post though, and that&#8217;s half-allowed, but I felt that I should have written a slightly more objective <em>article</em> mentioning also all the other competitors.</p>
<p>Anyhow, right when I went to submit my article to Digg, it turns out that another guy wrote <a href="http://digg.com/programming/5_Next_Generation_PHP_Frameworks">a similar round up</a>, which made it to Digg&#8217;s homepage. That was an annoying cohincidence, but in the end things didn&#8217;t go too bad: his roundup was more generic, while mine was more specific and detailed.</p>
<p style="float:left;"><img src="http://base--/img/pictures/dugg_detail.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>After submitting my article the reaction wasn&#8217;t instantaneous&#8230; 5, 7, 10, 13 diggs in the first two hours. Then shortly I made it to 30 and when the 40th visitor dugg it my article was moved to the first page!<br />
I immediately noticed it when I refreshed my stats page: a minute before my girlfriend was here telling me &#8220;oh look, over 400 visitors&#8230; not too bad&#8221;. Then I refreshed the page and it said <em>539</em>, I refreshed again and said 600-something&#8230; eeep&#8230; Digg effect!</p>
<p>A special praise goes to my new hosting company, <a href="http://www.bluehost.com/track/h3rald/CODE5">BlueHost</a>: the server didn&#8217;t go down and it managed the extra traffic fine! A good test for CakePHP as well, since I built this site with it.</p>
<p>So here I am&#8230; over 5000 visitors read my article, about 600 people dugg it, nearly 40 people commented it on digg.com and 20 directly on my site. And &#8211; except for the usual <em>Rails-is-better-than-anything-else</em> comments &#8211; they were generally positive. Over 250 people bookmarked on del.icio.us and many blogs mentioned it in many different countries.</p>
<p>Money? Didn&#8217;t make much with adsense at all: programmers <em>don&#8217;t</em> click on ads!<br />
Bandwidth? About 1GB was gone in the first five hours, now is obviously slowing down: oh well, I still have another 398GB available till the end of the month :P</p>