How Firefox can notify you of “The Digg Effect” via RSS Feeds

As I’m sure many of you are aware, Digg.com is among the most popular websites on the internet and boasts the potential to drive an enormous amount of traffic to websites. Digg publishes news articles and stories on its front page that receive the highest amount of votes — or “diggs” as they’re known. The difference with Digg however is that it relies on its incredibly large community to submit articles that they find interesting, whereby other members will review and “digg” articles that they deem worthy.

Getting to the front page of Digg certainly isn’t an easy task as the Digg community is considered to be quite a tough crowd to please where news articles are concerned; but when it does, you will no doubt notice an insane amount of traffic heading your way - provided that the news story that reached Digg’s front page was pointing to your site, of course.

Traffic generated from Digg is capable of crippling websites on a shared hosting environment and even dedicated servers simply because the sheer amount of visitors Digg sends your way is too much for your box to handle and completely brings it down; this is also known as the “Digg Effect”.

You may also find, if you’re a website owner, that over time as your website becomes more and more popular that visitors will happily submit various news articles that are written on your site to Digg.

How Firefox’s built in RSS Feed feature can alert you of being “Dugg”

One of the easiest ways to find out whether or not someone has submitted your news article is to take advantage of Firefox’s built in RSS Feed subscription feature. First off we need to make our way over to Digg’s search page, http://digg.com/search, then input the URL of your website into the search field and set the remaining three options to “URL only”, “Upcoming Stories” and “Sort Newest First” from within the drop-down boxes like so:

Upon pressing Digg’s search button you will be presented with all of your website’s upcoming stories that had been submitted at some point in the past in reverse chronological order. The reason for why we want our articles to be displayed in this order is because it will mean any stories that are submitted in the future will immediately rise to the top of the list and generally make it much easier for us down the line.

I’ll spare you the list of upcoming stories I have listed under my profile but I will point out the little RSS Feed icon that Digg sports just to the right of your submitted stories:

Subscribe to the RSS feed for this search, and your RSS reader will let you know when you have been dugg, before it ever gets to the front page.

By subscribing to the RSS Feed for this search, you will be notified via your RSS reader, of when any new stories are submitted to Digg; and because this feed only displays your current articles in the upcoming stories queue, you will be given ample time to prepare for the “Digg Effect” should any stories reach the front page of Digg.

This is also something you can customize even further by, instead of subscribing to your website’s upcoming stories, subscribing to Digg’s “Front Page Stories” RSS Feed so you are only notified when your articles reach the front page. Go for whichever suits you best.