News from September, 2006

Well, that was a surprise. PDFTextOnline was linked to on Digg, and made it to the front page (it made it to #2 when I saw it).

Of course, you know the drill from here. We built PDFTextOnline and put it out there as a nifty little tool, hoping that some people would find it useful, and maybe a couple curious software developers and managers might stumble upon PDFTextStream as a great way to bring PDF text extraction like they see in PDFTextOnline into their organization. We haven’t promoted it, or even linked to it heavily on snowtide.com.

Given all that, we didn’t put PDFTextOnline on a particularly large server — in fact, it was running on a mid-level VPS. Definitely nothing special.

Then we got hit with the digg-effect, and whammo, say goodbye. I haven’t poked at the server logs much yet, but the flood of traffic was heavy and unyielding.

So, I got the hint — PDFTextOnline is genuinely interesting to an audience larger than us. Now I need to go server-shopping.

My hope is that PDFTextOnline will be back up later tonight, and then moved to a real server next week. Then maybe we can get slashdotted, and do it all over again!

We’ve finally recovered from our harrowing experience of being discovered via digg (so horrible to have the problem of too much attention!).  PDFTextOnline is back online, and greatly beefed up.

Also, the new interface I promised earlier is now in effect as well.  It’s simpler, easier to understand, and provides some new features as well (such as being able to choose the font used to display extracted PDF text, and being able to choose which layout mode should be used when performing each extraction).  Let us know what you think.

Finally, we’ve brought in Adsense ads.  I guess we’ve sold out now, eh?  Of course, it’s the smart thing to do given the pretty significant waves of traffic we continue to get from around the web that was prompted by the digg post.