Sometimes things happen when you least expect it. Yesterday was no exception.

It actually started back on March 20th when HMTKSteve of Ramblings from the Marginalized submitted my Downloading Pirated Anything Is NOT Illegal article to Digg. The traffic spike, which still shows on my Alexa stats, was unexpected. I didn't write the article for Digg or any other social site. It was more of a personal rant than anything else.

The continuation of massive traffic for that article started by accident. Jonathan of SmartWealthyRich stumbled an unrelated post the day before yesterday and sometime after midnight, a top stumbler spotted that article and stumbled it, setting off another StumbleUpon chain reaction. Again, it was unexpected, but at least my server didn't become inaccessible for hours (unlike the original traffic spike from Digg).

According to Clicky, I had 4,633 visitors with 9,294 page views. At the time of this writing, Google Analytics is not up-to-date yet, but still shows 4,575 visits (4,349 unique visitors) and 9,658 page views. The traffic from that stumble has slowed down, but is still going and has been going for more than 24 hours now.

I hope by sharing this with you, you can understand the consequences of writing controversial articles. Unlike some of my fellow blog authors, I'm perfectly content with watching my daily traffic slowly increase as time progresses. This kind of traffic madness makes it difficult to see what draws regular, daily readers. I'm not complaining, mind you, because the digg put UV on the blogosphere map and the recent stumble can only help to solidify its position.

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And now for some unrelated news. Alexa upgraded Sparky so that it works with the latest upgrade for Firefox (version 2.0.0.5). Thanks to Abhinav Sood for pointing it out. I must say that I didn't expect Alexa to act this quickly and it was an unexpected surprise.