Ben Buckman.net

(Cross-posted on the EchoDitto blog.)

It was the morning of Friday, February 13th, the slow end of a long week. Congress and the Obama administration were negotiating the details of the "stimulus" package, to which the Republicans had failed again to offer a constructive alternative other than tax cuts. The situation begged for satire and I needed a break. So when a gem of a tweet popped up at 11am in the corner of my screen, I jumped at it. The tweet was by Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU, aka @jayrosen_nyu. He wrote:

GOPproblemsolver.com. Plain white screen with a box: "enter any problem here." Click. Tells
you how big the tax cuts need to be to solve it.

He hadn't actually created it, it was just a concept, and I thought a brilliant one. It would be simple to implement, and I had accrued more than enough side-projects time to do it.

So I quickly bought the domain. (Meanwhile on Twitter, people were assuming that Rosen had created the site and commenting that it wasn't working.) I set it up in Drupal on my personal server, a little virtual machine with 512 MB of RAM, not optimized for high traffic (or at all really). It consisted of two pages: a homepage with a form asking, "What is the biggest problem in your life?" and a page for solutions. The solution was a randomly generated tax cut up to $100,000. Clicking a button that said the solution didn't make sense popped up another political jab. All set to go, at 1:03pm I tweeted...

Check out GOPProblemSolver.com. Utilizing the latest and greatest of Republican economic thought to improve your life. (thx @jayrosen_nyu!)

... and then the server promptly crashed. I rebooted it, the site went back up for a few minutes, and it crashed again. I had planned to launch the thing, get back to work, and check at the end of the day how it was going. But it was immediately hit with a barrage of visitors that overwhelmed my poorly configured server with swap overloads, and by launching it, I had committed to see it through. So I spent a good chunk of the next few days learning about LAMP optimization (in between reboots).

The server is probably still not optimized for thousands of simultaneous hits, but I did get it to a point where it stopped crashing, and the response was an impressive display of Twitter's viral potential. Even in the minutes between launch and my announcement, several people looking for Rosen's concept tweeted that it was up. I tweeted to Jay Rosen, who wrote, "I love the web. Today I did a back of the napkin tweet..." and his 12,000+ followers gave it quite a boost. Huffington Post (@huffpost, 7000+ followers) tweeted it moments later, and dozens followed over the course of the day.

Overall solutions (clicks through the form) looked like this. The first two days were plagued by server crashes, so a lot of people probably never got through to the site. Daily hits peaked on February 18th, then quickly dropped off. As I write this, 34,771 solutions have been created. (It's not millions, sure, but I still think it's cool. And who knows what would have happened if the server had stayed up and I had pushed it hard on more media?)



More interesting than hits is the word cloud - from a dump of all the problems entered - which seems to be a great sampling of what troubles Americans today:



GOP Problem Solver subsequently moved back to its roots, tweeting from @gopsolutions. So far the feed is short, but I expect no shortage of satire-worthy Republican ideas over the next several years, so what's the rush. And if you ever need a genuine Republican solution to a problem, you always know where to go.

I'd like to thank the Academy.... seriously though, it's great to work at a company like EchoDitto where it's possible to do this.