Liz Strauss of Successful and Outstanding Bloggers is attempting to “break the web” today at noon CST from Chicago (GMT -6). As part of her Showcase Your Blog series, she will be using the future post feature in WordPress to publish a blog post a minute showcasing more than 250 blogs.
Has anyone set up WordPress to do this before? Maybe some splogs or scrapers, but this is an exciting example of how a community project can use the WordPress future post feature, and push WordPress and the server to keep up with the server and database load. Liz is part of the b5media network, so this is a test of their setup as well.
Liz tells me that the blogs she is showcasing are excellent, some of the most exciting, beautiful, and social blogs around, so you are in for a treat as you watch her Blog Showcase churn out, minute by minute. I wonder what the traffic count is going to be on her blog’s front page. Luckily, she’s using Woopra to track her traffic, stats, and visitors live. What fun!
Go check out the minute-by-minute Blog Showcase! You can also follow the Twitter stream at b2show.
Lorelle on WordPress 
26 Comments
I love this idea
Oh! It’s like a blogday extravaganza! Sounds fun! She should’ve waited ’till August 31st, though. 🙂
Great idea!
I bet it will all work just fine… 🙂
I know I’ve been reloading it trying to find my blog. It hasn’t shown up yet.
Hi Lorelle,
I joined Liz’s “Blog Show”. I’m number 226, listed under “Barbara”. (I neglected to give her my last name. Oooops!) I think this is a great idea and I’m sure her traffic will skyrocket. I’ve already had a conversation with one of my community members as she would like me to do something similar. It’s a great idea for helping others and building community.
This is like the electronic version of “throw crap at a wall and see what sticks…” Seems rather spammy to me, but Good luck with that! If it adds a few more clicks on those ads, whatever…
Let this NOT be a new trend.
@ Scott Web: On the other hand, as someone who doesn’t have a blog with tons of readers it is nice to see someone of this stature who is willing to link to me. Yes, I was only on the front page for about 10 minutes.
I don’t know anything about you or your blog, and I’m not trying to lump you in with anyone. But this is the first time I’ve seen something like this. The ones where everyone links to everyone, that seems spammy to me. But this? I don’t know.
I think this was a great idea and very generous of Liz to have done this (I’m sure it took a lot of her time). My blog was one of the ones featured, and I looked around and saw a lot of great blogs.
Wow, that is awesome. I can’t even think about posting one every minute. My fingers would break off I think.
Thanks Lorelle for bringing this up, its a fascinating showcase.
I was on Liz’s site while the count was around 132. It was pretty neat to see posts coming up as I refreshed the page. Though I didn’t know she had used the “future post” option. I have to say that that’s pretty cool.
Nice catch to post this, Lorelle. Liz is one of the most generous and forward thinking bloggers around, I always enjoy her work. She does something else which I really like and which anyone could adopt … she runs regular ‘open mike’ nights when a question is posed and anyone and everyone is invited to comment or even take off on their own subject.
Proof positive of a concept we almost all know and yet often have a blind spot about (and I am looking in a mirror as I type this) … if you want freinds and community spirit and thus traffic and buzz, you have to _be_ friendly and open … all too easy to forget in the rush to do this, do that, and make this or that better. Thanks agin to you and to Liz.
Very interesting indeed. I enjoyed observing it – good experiment and thanks for alerting us to it.
Seems like a really dumb idea to me. No, one person doing it is not going to break the web. But when thousands of “me too, me too, I wanna do that” types join in it can’t be good. And I can’t imagine that the content is worth reading.
It was AWESOME, Lorelle! I bet it was a lot of work, compiling 260 blogs and scheduling them to automagically appear every minute. And I’d probably take a week to go through every blog! 😀
@ pelf:
On behalf of Liz, thanks all for your thoughts on this. To those part of the showcase, WOW! Some great information and what a great way to help bloggers define their blogs and promote them. I’m uncovering all kinds of interesting blogs.
As for breaking the web, Liz had quite a few problems that we’re trying to track down the source with this attempt. While the web isn’t broken, parts of her site are. We’re not sure which elements caused the problems, the server, b2media’s setup, WordPress, the database, Plugins, or what. I’ll be writing up a summary of her experiences later today or tomorrow as we figure out what happened. Things did break.
And thanks for all about warning me about the spam. Gone a few hours and the buggers sneak in, don’t they. 😀 Got them all!
I use future posting all the time. I have a weekly post set up for early friday mornings. it is a commentLuv link with about 20 links from dofollow blogs using the commentLuv plugin. I keep about six weeks in advance scheduled to post in case I get bogged down with one of my other online projects and haven’t posted to Blogging For Noobs the rest of the week. On another I have a music review that goes in automatically on tuesdays and fridays and a what’s on TV this week feature that gets posted on Sunday afternoons. Future posting is very handy for the busy blogger, now if I could integrate it into stumbleupon and reddit I would be in heaven…
The only problem with the experiment was that, due to the speed with which she was posting, blogs further down the list didn’t really get seen. Still, any publicity is good publicity, and now the post is up forever, so searches will still turn it up.
Most depressing, though, is that what I expected to be a good publicity stunt not only didn’t result in very little additional traffic for me, but I now see that my pagerank went down over the weekend. That’s a bit of a blow.
I didn’t do anything this extravagant, but I did have over a month’s worth of posts scheduled in advance. I only do my site as a part-time deal, and I think it’s cool that someone could do this … wish I had the time.
hey im new here so was is going on in the site what can i do and not do
dang. Wish I could draw that fast, I’d do the same with cartoons.
Nice, I will watch carefully, I also suspect so will politcal and social campaigns as well as spammers.
Sounds interesting…
That twitter user doesn’t show anything for me.
“That page doesn’t exist!”
The only one I found on the blog mentioned was http://twitter.com/lizstrauss
Wow, that was cool idea.
@ ShaolinTiger:
I’ve talked to Liz about that Twitter link and she says that she didn’t set it up. She’s checking with who did and finding out what the story is. She is considering using it, if they will let her, for future Blog to Showcase events since it tracked the action during the Saturday releases of all the posts.
Thanks!
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