Have a successful previous site to which you can rake in unique hits from.

A.H

A trick that I use is cloaking. If you are using a placeholder, you put the dev site in the actual http://www.whatever.com domain, cloaking it in your .htaccess therebye serving the placeholder to all user agents except the allowed user agent string, which gets the dev version.

This makes launching as easy as commenting out a single line in your .htaccess, and if you happen to find a big error, you can ‘close the door’ by uncommenting the line.

This also works great for redesigns and relaunches. You can test the redesign live ‘in-situ’, delivering the redesigned version to one user agent while everyone else gets the current site. This depends on your CMS and how it handles requests tho’.

The .htaccess bit is like this:

RewriteCond %!{HTTPUSERAGENT} someuseragent$
RewriteRule ^placeholder.html [L]

For what it’s worth every Reboot vote is linked not only to a cookie but also browser width and height and an IP address in the database. If the unique fingerprint created by cookie, browser dimensions, etc. of the voter don’t match up, we fall back on IP address. The same IP address can only vote up to 5 times per 24 hours per reboot. So someone would have to go to quite a lot of trouble to vote your site down — as in, like, refreshing their IP address every few minutes ;)