Voting for The 2008 Weblog Awards is now over. This year's turnout was simply amazing; 3.2 million page views, 2 million visitors, and 933,022 votes cast in 48 categories.
First, we'd like to apologize for performance problems today. We really thought that the first day spike was going to be the biggest traffic day (one that we for the most part successfully navigated) and that traffic to the site would slowly decrease as the week of voting went on. Up until Sunday traffic followed our expectations, but Monday and Tuesday caught us a bit by surprise, with traffic rising to the first day level again.
Next year we are moving to a cloud computing environment which will allow us to add load balancing, better content caching, and an (nearly) unlimited number of web servers to handle traffic.
On to more current matters. For the next 24 hours we will be finishing our assessments of all of the vote logs in all of the categories. To date there have been no votes subtracted, but that may well change before winners are certified. In the event vote totals are corrected for identified cheating we will leave a note on the poll page where the change is made. The certified list of winners will be published here on Thursday morning. The winners list will include instructions for winners on how to collect their winners badges.
Thank you again to everyone who participated, and especially to my team (listed in the credits) for helping to pull this off yet again.
And to those just now visiting for the first time, please go explore the nearly 500 finalist blogs in the 48 categories!
