I had my first SURGE of stumbleupon traffic and managed to capture the event on Camtasia!

I think I only got the tail end of it but it lasted for a nice while, it even came back the next day although at a reduced rate, stats and geekery below the video.

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I’m guilty of giving some of my own posts a thumbs up now and then to start a trickle of Stumbleupon traffic to an article I have written or seen elsewhere such as the Hide a rar file in a jpeg. I saw it on a blog completely obliterated with adsense blocks so I decided to reprint it here in a cleaner-easier-to-read way. It got some traffic and upped my feed subscriber count but, the traffic wasn’t huge, just a few hits each hour, but still nice to have some new readers to my new blog

Then, I saw a small side article in a daily newspaper (yes, there is news available outside the internet!) about how Tussauds in London was due to show it’s first ever computer game character, it looked like a great story and I did a bit of research on Google for “Tussauds” ,”London” and “master chief”.

There were plenty of articles but none that mentioned London. Great!, there was one page that I found about Master Chief being in the Las Vegas version of Tussauds, it had some good information and some really great pics so I thought I would snag the pics, do some Photoshopping on it to give them a London edge and “make me an article” for here.

I was quite pleased with the Master chief is coming to London and gave it a thumbs up on my work browser and finished off for the day and went home content with writing a new article that didn’t suck and wasn’t a copy and paste of some content found elsewhere.

When I got back home, I went to my Live page (a plugin [link] that displays hits to your site in realtime) in my Wordpress dashboard to see what was going on at FiddyP and I was amazed!, the video above is the tail end of what I saw.

These are the load times in the middle of the spike..

So, even with 141 at a time coming in, the server was still able to send the page in less than 5 seconds to most of the world.

I think the difference with this self stumble was that it was for a unique article and a few people gave it a thumbs up one after the other, I think that if you can get a few thumbs up as soon as the submitted page goes into circulation then you get a sort of exponential increase which could lead to another one and so on. As long as you keep getting thumbs up, the traffic will keep coming.

The hits started again the next day..

Some google stats..
One of the (many) good things about Google analytics is the way you can refine the stats so you can see all the individual stats for a particular referrer or page, here’s what was found just for the stumbleupon visitors

Not bad, average of 2 pages per visit means a lot of them took the time to see what else was on the site. 33% is a pretty good bounce rate for a social networking happening.

Encouragingly, nearly 90% of the people coming in were using Firefox. Sensible people use Stumbleupon

The vast majority of visitors had bigger than a 1024×768 screen, most had widescreens which surprised me, there must be a lot more widescreens out there than I thought.

I’ve seen a lot of advice about being a top Stumbler or increasing your ‘juice’ at places like StumbleGods that say you should add as many friends as you like and be a social junkie with comments and reviews of peoples profile pages. I think they’re right but for someone as busy as me, it’s hard to dedicate time to spend all my day trying to make contacts, the upside is, the contacts I do make are because they have recommended particularly good pages or I’ve ‘met’ them through this blog.

I was trying to think how I could repeat the event with a new post and spent a little while thinking what “they” want but, I don’t want to try and predict what people that come here will like, that’s not why I started this blog.

The best thing that I can do is, not worry about what Stumblers want and carry on making my blog for me for fun and writing about things that I find interesting without re-hashing stuff that’s already been done, if people like a post they will stumble it and if it’s good enough then sure as eggs is eggs, other people will and so on.

Overall, it was a good experience being bathed in hits for a short while. At least my server didn’t crash and it has given me some encouragement to carry on doing the things I like to do anyway and that’s plenty of geekery with a sprinkle of humour and a drop or two of nice pictures.

Thanks Stumbleupon! (and users) it was fun while it lasted!