[0:00] now you might not be aware of it but the
[0:02] channel has a Blog to go with it it
[0:04] doesn’t get the same love and attention
[0:06] as the YouTube channel gets but
[0:07] occasionally I’ll put something on the
[0:09] blog that doesn’t really fit on YouTube
[0:11] recently I was playing with chat GPT and
[0:14] it made a lot more sense to do a blog
[0:16] post instead of a video what was quite
[0:19] exciting is that the post made it onto
[0:21] Hacker News a very popular site for
[0:23] nerds and Geeks it’s pretty much
[0:25] replaced slash dot as the place to get
[0:27] Tech news at one point we hit number two
[0:30] on the home page which is pretty amazing
[0:33] in the space of one day the site
[0:35] received over 45 000 requests for the
[0:38] page and according to my logs that was
[0:40] over 29 000 unique IP addresses to put
[0:43] that into perspective here’s the daily
[0:45] stats from Google analytics for December
[0:48] this sudden influx of people is known as
[0:51] The Hacker News effect for a lot of
[0:53] websites especially ones that have
[0:54] complex functionality this can cause the
[0:56] site to completely collapse and stop
[0:58] serving traffic fortunately for my blog
[1:01] it’s not really an issue it’s a
[1:03] statically generated site made using
[1:05] Jekyll so it’s just plain HTML CSS and
[1:08] images I’m also hosting my site on
[1:10] Amazon AWS and serving everything via
[1:13] cloudfront So in theory it should be
[1:15] able to handle a lot more traffic
[1:16] without falling over but please don’t
[1:19] try and break my website it’s also very
[1:22] cheap to run I had a look at the costs
[1:24] around the time period and in total it
[1:26] was around 12 cents to serve this
[1:27] traffic I’m sure there are even cheaper
[1:30] ways to host the site but this is what
[1:31] I’m used to and it works well enough for
[1:33] me I did recently set up traffic logging
[1:36] on cloudfront which means I’ve got some
[1:38] quite nice logs of The Hacker News
[1:39] effect using the IP addresses from the
[1:42] logs we can work out the approximate
[1:44] location of the requests it’s not always
[1:46] perfect but it does get you pretty close
[1:48] to where the traffic is coming from
[1:49] though sometimes all you can get is the
[1:51] country it’s pretty interesting to see
[1:54] the world light up as people get out of
[1:56] bed and check the latest news it’s
[1:58] pretty cool