
What hitting the front page of HN does to a new website - mhoad
http://aberrant.me/front-page-of-hacker-news/?utm_source=hacker_news&utm_medium=social&utm_content=blog+buttons&utm_campaign=organic+social
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MattJ100
_> 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://](http://) page
if the current page is [https://](https://) (see
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-15.1.3](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-15.1.3)
)

~~~
mhoad
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.

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

