BlinkLink Post-Mortem: 50k pageviews, 700 blinks

&quot;I stopped these at first with IP banning, and switched to Rack::Attack for throttling per-Twitter-ID.&quot;<p>I wonder what Twitter-ID he means. Is there an API to get a numeric ID for a given handle that stays the same even when you change your username? If he means the username, wouldn&#x27;t it be possible to programatically change the username after each request and thus avoid the throttling?

An interesting titbit of information from this post is the approx. # of visitors reaching the front page of HN can get you:<p>&quot;BlinkLink managed to get about <i>50k pageviews</i> against <i>17k visitors</i>&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not sure on how much other sources (Reddit, Twitter) contributed to that number though.