Wigitize.com, Post-Digg

Yesterday I hit the Digg front page with my Building a .com in 24 hours article. Apart from that I was also number one and number nine in the delicious rankings. Very exciting!

What is also interesting is that my rapidly build website – wigitize.com – got a lot of hits. My blog got about 25000 uniques, Wigitize about 10000. All these hits caused an incredible load on my small 256MB memory server so I quickly bought a second one and scaled up. Yesterday, I could finally stabilize the backgrounding on the website and everything is running fine ever since. Someone offered me a free slicehost slice too last night!

It’s also funny that people commented on how I must have too much time on my hands. I even got offered participation in startups and companies haha. In fact, the opposite is true, but I do love hacking away in my free time. Besides, it was xmas, that means coding, drinking and eating right?!

While combating the performance issues I had yesterday, I learned these technical lessons:

Make sure you’re running the right version of tools. Apparently I was running a very old backgroundrb version. So I now upgraded to Ezra’s 0.2.1 version

Debug things in production-mode on your local machine! Some code – especially funky code like backgroundrb – will behave differently on production as opposed to dev. Often people like me are strictly developing in ‘development’ mode and than publishing to staging/production environments. I found a mayor issue that was screwing up everything in backgroundrb by debugging things in production mode on my MacBook.

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