How to prepare your website or blog for the Digg effect

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Many of you know that once you are able to get a story popular on Digg.com the traffic will flow. The traffic will flow to your site at an amazing rate, amazing enough that word-press might not be Able to handle it. There are multiple steps that can be done to prevent the damage.

The first step is to use Litespeed web-server instead of Apache. I have been a huge fan of Apache for a long time. Apache destroys IIS is so many different ways!

With Litespeed you can enable the web-server’s gzip function resulting gzipped file. Litespeed allows you to set a a gzip cache directory. For normal traffic it’s worth doing so pages load faster.
The mod_gzip site is a great resource if you want to find out more about compressing HTTP content.

There is a wordpress plug-in out there called Super Cache 0.4! Download it here!

Major features of this plug-in include:

  • A “lock down” button. Also known as a “Digg Proof” button. This basically prepares your site for a heavy digging or slashdotting. It locks down the static cache files and doesn’t delete them when a new comment is made.
  • Automatic updating of your .htaccess file. It is best to backup your existing .htaccess file being install the plugin
  • Don’t super cache any request with GET parameters. You really need to use fancy permalinks now.
  • WordPress search works again.
  • Better version checking of wp-cache-config.php and advanced-cache.php in case you’re using an old one.
  • Better support for Microsoft Windows.
  • Properly serve cached static files on Red Hat/Cent OS systems or others that have an entry for gzip in /etc/mime.types.
  • The Reject URI function works again and now uses regular expressions!

This is something definitely worth checking out if your blog gets a lot of traffic like mine :)

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