Hello. I specialize in graphic design and development for web applications.
I just started work on a Wordpress plugin I’ve been wanting to create for a while. Essentially, it provides a large amount of tools for Digg. You know, “digg this” buttons and the likes. Anyways, where this plugin will really excel is the caching function.
Most plugins I’ve found will cache pages to your local server when you tell them to. How useful! You can somewhat mitigate the Digg effect on your CPU provided you are monitoring these sites to see if you hit the homepage. (The statement of usefulness was sarcasm, by the way.) This plugin will take a more practical, pro-active approach. When you get more than a few hits from Digg within five minutes, the plugin will query Digg’s API to see if your site hit the homepage. This is already much more useful than the other plugins.
To make it more useful, the plugin will, upon detecting that your site is on the homepage, send a cached version of your site to Amazon S3 and redirect people thereto.
So far a lot of it is working. On the detection side, at least. I’ve got to start on the S3 side, which brings up some interesting problems: the issue of how to redirect people with the lowest CPU load, while still maintaining the Wordpress permalink structure, and the issue of caching CSS and image files. If anyone has ideas on those two, leave a note in the comments. Otherwise this plugin should be out sometime in the next month or so.
Say your words!