Today I noticed a spike in traffic coming from a post on Spread Firefox where I had made a comment. Not a ton of traffic, just ~15 hits from the same page on the same day, but that’s unusual for traffic from SFX posts—especially old ones. I checked to see if it had climbed into the site’s list of top posts (the usual explanation), but it wasn’t there. I just couldn’t figure out what was causing the traffic.
Then I realized the author of that post had another story show up on Slashdot today. I discovered this chain of links:
- Slashdot: Just what has Microsoft been doing for IE 7?
- Idealog: Microsoft Drops The Ball on Internet Explorer 7 Standards Compliance [archive.org]
- SFX: Should NewsCloud.com Remain Firefox Only? [archive.org]
- The Alternative Browser Alliance (via signature in comment)
You can see how powerful the Slashdot effect is, if it can cause a noticeable (if minor) spike in traffic to a page 3 degrees away!
Of course, it pales next to being linked from the ISC Handler’s Diary, which seems to have pulled in 10 times as many visitors in 2 days. (Thanks!)
