What hitting the front page of HN does to a new website

aberrant.me

2 pointsmhoad3 comments

> Note: What you may notice from the video above also is that almost zero of the traffic appears to be coming directly from the official Hacker News URL. I am not entirely sure why but almost all of that traffic was reported as “Direct” in Google Analytics which made things a little frustrating for tracking purposes.

The views likely reported as 'direct' because of HN's usage of https. The HTTP spec requires that the referer header is not sent to a http:// page if the current page is https:// (see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-15.1.3 )

Yeah I had someone actually point this out to me just before actually. I had been using HTTP Everywhere plug in so I didn't realise that HN was now HTTPS by default but cheers for the clarification.

The video was a nice touch, really helps add a level of reality to the situation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com