Another Day, Another Slashdotting

So today is my first day back after a week off - recovery time after a month-long uber-crunch for the Big Project - and what do I find? One of our servers going down and down and down again. After going through the usual checklist of Things That Could Have Gone Wrong, I finally sussed out the reason - a good, hard, old-fashioned Slashdotting for one of our sites : 1001 Inventions has been Slashdotted here: 1001 Islamic Inventions .

Damn, if I'd known this at the time, we could have saved a good couple of hours of several people - a full man-day of resource, in fact..... so what do you reckon are the chances of getting Slashdot to implement an early warning system?

They already have a teaser on the front page : "The next Slashdot article will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early" so maybe they could warn the site that's about to get hammered : "You are about to get several hundred thousand geeks hitting your site all at once, signing up, creating accounts and posting troll comments / Goatse links / lame Natalie Portman-based in-jokes / pornographic ascii-art renderings of lewd acts with Tux The Linux Penguin....... get yer holding page up!"

Haven't had a good Slashdotting since I was asked, many years ago, to put a press release up on the site of a small biotech company for which we'd written a small cms and front-end site. I did the usual copy-and-paste job without even reading the content........ and it turned out to be THE press release announcing the successful cloning of Dolly The Sheep. Within half an hour, lights were red all over the place and my boss was on the phone trying to get some alternative hosting based in the States...... ah, happy memories......

....and you try an' tell young folk today that, and they won't believe yer! Aye.....


BTW : There's a not-very-highlighted-and-very quickly-done-but-actually-quite-nifty mashup behind the "influence everyday english" link - a tag-style cloud indicating relative frequency of usage of each word, which links through to a page bringing in content relevant to that word from.... ooh, all over the place....