This morning, Digg removed ranking information from user profiles. I commented on the story, pointing to my top users list for people who were still interested in their rank. Digg CEO Jay Adelson responded to my comment thusly:

"We no longer display that rank information, so don't be surprised if Chris's list is no longer accurate (or stays unchanged). (A Netscape developer?)"

Well, my list has been updated since then, so we can safely assume that I wasn't using that information (which I've said from the beginning). As long as Digg displays the name of the user that submitted each story, it will be trivial to determine the top users. I'll continue to aggregate the data until I'm forced by Digg (or asked nicely, with a "pretty please") to take it down.

Side note: I love the "(A Netscape developer?)" parenthetical that Jay included. I'm not sure of its meaning though. Is it "How did a Netscape developer manage to crack our code and get this information?" or is it "Netscape has developers now?" In any case, it's irrelevant, but I still laughed.

My restoration of Digg's Top Users page yesterday got a lot of press around the Web:

Both the list and my blog post about the list were submitted to Digg, but both were buried off of the front page. (Buried, or manually removed?)

Michael Arrington mentioned the list at TechCrunch, and the readers commenting on his post inexplicably turned against Netscape. Even though my actions had nothing to do with Netscape, the fact that I write code for them as well apparently makes my reproduction of the list "lame":

"If this would have come from someone NOT at a competitor (in this case Netscape), I would have thought 'cool!' The fact that this comes from someone at Netscape makes me think 'lame!'."

Deep Jive Interests (a personal favorite of mine) was the first to wonder how long it would be until I heard from Digg's infamous legal team. Nothing yet, but I'll blog about anything that comes in.

This blog somehow decided to go with the headline "Netscape Bringing Top Digg Users Page Back." I think if Netscape was sponsoring this effort, they'd want some kind of mention somewhere on the page. What? It only links to Digg? That's awfully strange.

Like many others, Technacular incorrectly reported that I was scraping user profile pages for the rank number that is displayed there; kudos to them, however, for being the only ones to update their post after I sent them a clarification on how the script actually works.

Additionally, my blog was linked from Techmeme, blurbed on Download Squad, and mentioned at ValleyWag.

Oh, and there's one question that I've been asked a few times that I'd like to address here: Sorry ladies, but I'm already taken.

I've updated the Greencode Wordpress theme (which I'm using on my site) to version 0.3. Since version 0.2, I've added a print stylesheet (screenshot of a printed page below), optimized the header image to reduce its size by half, and fixed a few miscellaneous bugs.

You can download the newest version from the Greencode homepage.

Digg removed its top users list this morning. However, as I mentioned yesterday,

It’s an exercise in futility. A competent programmer could easily throw together a page scraper to determine the top submitters, so when the dust settles, Digg will still have problems with pay-for-play, but the most prolific users will no longer be recognized by Digg for their work that makes the site so successful.

To prove my point, I've done exactly that: I've put together a script that displays the top 100 users at Digg, with the list being updated twice per day. You can see the list here.

Update: I do work for Netscape, but this has nothing to do with them. I did this on my own time and of my own volition.

Also, I didn't create this list for any mean-spirited reasons; I enjoy Digg and the service it provides, but I think Kevin made the wrong choice in removing the top users list. I'm not trying to profit off of this, and I'm not trying to scalp members from Digg for Netscape. I'm just proving a point - this data is easily attainable by anyone who is motivated to get it. Removing the top users list from digg.com does little in stopping people from finding out who the top Diggers are.

My latest teaser/progress report for Netscape 9 is available at the Netscape blog. More discussion at UFAQ.org and the Netscape Community message boards.

Until URL Fixer got Dugg last week, I hadn't had a good real-life example for my Social Traffic Monitor Wordpress plugin. What follows is an analysis of the traffic my blog received from social news and bookmarking sites late last week, as recorded by the Social Traffic Monitor plugin.

This is the chart that the Social Traffic Monitor generated for my URL Fixer page, showing visitors per hour from Thursday morning to Monday morning.

The first small hump is when URL Fixer was featured on Download Squad (and subsequently, Lifehacker) on Thursday morning. (The page had been submitted to Netscape some time ago, which is why the plugin was already logging the traffic at that point.) The huge orange spike is when the post hit the front page of Digg, at about 11PM Thursday night. Traffic was huge that first hour, but it halved by the next hour, and then slowly tapered down as the post moved to the second page of Digg, and then the third, etc.

The orangish hump in the middle of the graph is traffic from StumbleUpon. As you can see, the traffic from SU was never as intense as it was from Digg, but it was more consistent, and longer-lasting. (Just as those are good qualities to have in chewing gum, they are desired assets of website traffic as well.) StumbleUpon continued to drive heavy traffic to the post for about 10 hours, and then in smaller amounts of the next day and a half. Most of the visitors to the URL Fixer page are still coming from StumbleUpon.

Overall, I received about 8,000 visitors from StumbleUpon, 4,000 visitors from Digg, 2,000 from Lifehacker, and about 600 from Download Squad. (Del.icio.us barely registered with about 200 referrals.) So although StumbleUpon sent the most visitors my way, it appears that the traffic coming from Digg was the most appropriate to the content: according to my traffic logs, from Thursday night to noon on Friday, over 60% of visitors to the page actually downloaded the Firefox extension. After that (when visitors starting coming from SU), only about 15% of visitors were downloading the extension.

If you have a Wordpress blog and would like to track how many visitors you receive from social sites, download and install the Social Traffic Monitor Wordpress plugin.

After giving it a workout this week with all the visitors to my blog from Digg and StumbleUpon, I've made some changes to the Social Traffic Monitor plugin for Wordpress, and I'm releasing version 1.2.

Since version 1.1, I've added StumbleUpon as a social news/bookmarking source, fixed a few bugs with logging non-social-referring sites, and I've added the option to supply a formatting string for the plugin's output. What this means is that you can now call the plugin like this:

	<php social_traffic('<div>%s</div>'); ?>

and the the plugin will replace the "%s" with its output, but only if it has something to display; otherwise, it will display nothing at all. This allows you to add borders, positioning data, or just your own custom code to the plugin's output. (Calling social_traffic(); is equivalent to calling social_traffic("%s");.)

To upgrade, simply download and unzip version 1.2 and upload the included social-traffic.php to your wp-content/plugins/ directory.

While I was reading over the comments at Lifehacker's post on URL Fixer, I came across this critique:

[...] I've run into one little problem with this sucker. I avoid bookmarks like the plague and, instead, create keywords to jump to sites by typing in one word or a short phrase. Anyway, one of my keywords was the term "intranet" which linked to my office's internal database pages. This extension would always turn that into intra.net which would send me out into the web for a site that I didn't actually want to visit. [...]

This situation hadn't occurred to me before, but now that I'm aware of it, I've updated URL Fixer to check first if the text in the URL bar is a shortcut URL, and if so, to leave it alone. Thanks, dashifen!

URL Fixer will now correct ".ku" to ".uk", but I've made no decision on colour, metre, or encyclopaedia.

Cheerio!

I've posted the first in a series of teasers for Netscape 9.0 at the Netscape blog:

[...] Netscape 9 will be a standalone browser, and from this screenshot, you can infer several things: it will be tightly integrated with the Netscape.com service, as evidenced by the icons for the two available Netscape.com extensions (Friends' Activity Sidebar and the Sitemail Notifier). Several Netscape.com-based extensions will be built into the browser; only these two have been previously announced. [...]

The blurb is also posted at several forums for discussion: UFAQ.org, Netscape.com, and the Netscape community discussion boards.