Be Excellent To Each Other

I was up late last night, and noticed that PTS had 1000 unique hits by 2am. This is quite unusual as my counter resets at midnight and the site gets about this many hits a day.

After running the stats I couldn't see a massive single website referring me, although this morning after getting up to 4500 hits for the day I noticed that a giant shitload have reported as coming via Stumbleupon.

I headed over there, but for the life of me cannot see where I've been linked from, or why any such link has generated an unusual number of hits.

Techies/nerds, please assist my curiousity.

Maybe Stu added you in his Facebook.

Your site is about food, large food in particular.
People like food, people that sit on the internet all day really like food.
Stumbleupon tells people about sites they may also like.
People that like food may also like your site.
Zardoz's answer was much, much better. I'm sorry.

2AM? Maybe the presnit got peckish and ordered his minions to download snacks off the internets.

I just got an email from "Rubber Republic viral and advertainment services" telling me that they saw my blog and that I might like Siren: Blood Curse, coming soon to the PS3.

Stumbleupon is a social networking site. Basically you install it as a toolbar on your browser and as you browse websites, you click "I like this" or "I don't like this". Then after a while it starts to do stuff like the Amazon recommendations, saying "hey, a bunch of people who liked those things you liked also liked this thing, you should check it out".

Dunno why you'd get a surge of traffic though.

I know what it is, I just don't know why there was a sudden burst there. The hit rate has slowed now to an almost normal rate. hmmm.

You could simply have got a post on a big forum somewhere.

Well you've all been terribly insightful so far, so thanks

Yeah, tell me about it. If you'd asked about fprotting your tarballs you'd probably have got as many responses as you did hits.

Mostly smutty.

You should explore different contexts for usage of the expression "mostly smutty"

They're mostly smutty at night... mostly...

I think stumbleupon operates a bit like digg. I think a page can generate buzz, that feeds back into the system and sends more people there, before dying away again.

So it's pretty awesome, because it's not one person who's linked to you and sent people to you, it's multiple people agreeing and that is always nice.

What I particularly don't understand is that yesterday, when the site got 8x as much traffic as normal, the google ads exposures weren't significantly higher than usual. A little bit, but not 8x more, which suggests that either google is a load of lying shit, or people weren't looking at any of the project pages where the ads are located.

They weren't viewing my food blog either, as while hits were up there too, it wasnt 7000 hits worth.

Don't get it.

Could someone have been hotlinking an image instead? I get little spikes in traffic when Torrent sites decide to borrow image thumbnails to accompany their listings.

Good idea, but that can't be it. My counter runs on specific pages, so they're definitely being viewed.

Hey, Vasquez, are you ever mistaken for a man?

Actually, she looks much better with short hair in Aliens than she did with long red hair as John Connor's adopted mum in T2

I'd have suspected it might be your site coming near the top of Google searches, which could cause AVG's site monitor to notch up lots of fake 'hits', but it seems that issue has been resolved.

You are entirely correct there sir. It was *years* before I realised that was Vasquez. YEARS. I felt most foolish, considering I basically spent the first half of the 90s watching those, Total Recall, and the Airplane and Naked Gun movies on a repeat loop

Shockingly, I only JUST realised they are one and the same person. AND I would list ALiens in my vague 'fave' movies. I apologise. I'm new

DBSnappa has blown my fucking mind.

Same woman? Jesus christ. I never knew, but now it's said - it's so fucking obvious.

Wow.

Crikey.