Wow! Songs Not to Play at a Wedding has been one of our more popular posts for a long time, and I’d seen hits start coming in from StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site, about a week ago. But that was a trickle. I wasn’t prepared to check my stats at lunch today and see 1,112 visits from StumbleUpon (here’s the review page) since 5pm yesterday (WordPress’ daily stats rotate at midnight GMT), with another 632 the day before.

It was so unusual I was half-convinced there must be a glitch in the tracking script, so I checked the server logs to compare. The server logs actually showed more hits—over 1300, in fact—during the same period. A lot of them were duplicated, though, which presumably means that people either hit reload after 10 seconds (not sure why), or they did something with the SU toolbar and came back. (Sadly, WP doesn’t yet provide 304 responses except on feeds).

If I’d caught the surge earlier, I would have turned on WP-Cache, but it seems to have weathered the storm just fine.

The last big traffic spike this site got was at the end of July, when three things converged: Girl Genius had a second round of technical difficulties, so people were searching and finding my post from the previous month. Lots of people were looking for Comic-Con photos. And my post on finding two female Flash cosplayers showed up on When Fangirls Attack. Even that only brought the total up to ~1,400. Today’s running 1,699 total hits to the blog, with just over 4 hours left to go.

It does seem to be slowing down now, so it’s not likely to have the staying power of the April 2006 surge in traffic to Another One Bites the Dust when the Jamie Jack and Stench show went off the air. That one managed ~600 hits per day over about 3 weeks.