Hows that pownce thing working out he started?

and seriously, the users are even finding where the bugs are, all you gotta do is hire your wonderful outsourced programmers to fix them. They can’t even dock pay for having to fix half the stuff now that your users have found the bugs for you… ha ha!

Here’s how I easily find stories on digg (replace “Linux Enthusiast” with whatever you want to search for:

“Linux Enthusiast” site:digg.com

Shannon V.

The scenario is always the same.

I’m at work browsing digg headlines, and I will see a posting for something provocative that I don’t dare click on while at the office. When I get home, the story I wanted to read hours earlier is now buried too many pages deep to find it, so I try and do a search within digg. The search results contain everything BUT the article from that same day! Even if I meticulously enter the exact title of the story word for word, the search engine still cannot find it!

First off stop adding features and fix the old ones.

Second, I can name hundreds of sites that are every bit as complex as digg and run virtually error free. (and really are “small” websites)

I personally own a site that gets over 10 million hits a month (I know a drop in the barrel compared to digg), however mine has virtually no errors, has complexities digg never dreamed about (loads of machine learning algorithms, such as ANN’s and things powering core features of my website) and I am the sole maintainer and builder of the website. And frankly it took me only about a month of full time work to make it and I spend about 20 hours a month total on updates (spread out over the month) and with that come up with updates all the time. Updates are easy if the original design of the site was good on the back end.

I also have seemlessly scaled it from an old PC in my home running on a DSL line hosting it, to a multi-server cluster that lives in a fancy hosting center (though I still do all the work to maintain it, they just give me the bandwidth I need). And along the way I never had had slow downs because of it. I also have the current state of my serving power one or two levels up from what it needs to be. Again if the server backend structure (and website design) is sound it is practically as easy as just plugging in a new server to scale it.

Digg IS a big company (about the 100th most popular site on the web, estimated to be worth around a half a BILLION dollars). They also just signed a HUGE ad contract with Mickysoft and so have some cash to play with. They need to invest that in re-building their site, as myspace did when they got some money.

Myspace used to be the buggiest site on the web, but now it seems to run pretty well since they switched to the new design in asp.net.

That’s not trashing digg, that is just good business. You have to value your customers time more than your own. If your customers are seeing 10 second page load times and spending loads of time having to get around errors just so they can use your site then frankly it won’t be long before the customers go away. And given digg only exists popularly BECAUSE of the customers, I’d think they’d put a little more effort into fixing the problems that are inherent in the site.

The problem with businesses that go from nothing to HUGE within a couple years is often that the people who run them don’t really know what they are doing and have to learn quickly as they go.

Again, that’s not trashing, that is constructive criticism.

Digg is still a relatively small company that is adjusting to its user-growth and needs. They keep adding new features to make its devotees happy. It takes time to fix some of these problems.

That little jab with LAMP was totally uncalled for and I really think that they’re doing the best they can. The folks at Digg aren’t stupid and they only have so many resources folks!

They’re not Microsoft or Google…

// X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.0-8+etch1

And for some static content they use lighttpd, so not exclusively Apache..

Anyway, the random logout issue is annoying, just like the too much crap on the frontpage.. with this friends thing digg has turned into a social bazaar where the loudest can be always heard. If I’ve 142 friends, then I submit something, that’s like instant frontpage.

I’ve never submitted anything from my site before and to my knowledge no one else has. Honestly, I’ve never even had content on my site until a month or so ago. It was just personal links for myself.

I actually have started putting good content on my site and decided to digg something from it and bam, got the banend message.