And if not, at least make the content heavily cacheable, Coralized, and/or stored at heavy-use-friendly offsite locations, in the case of videos, pictures and other binary chunks.

And have some kind of traffic monitor in place so that when any page becomes responsible for crippling traffic, it's automatically presented in a low-bandwidth form until 24 hours after the flood dies down.

MirrorDot and Network Mirror can help survive a self-imposed Slashdotting, too. I'm surprised that more content provision sites don't have routines which automatically farm requests out to appropriate mirrors and, in extreme cases, create offsite mirrors at various locations and redirect there.

I guess it's just not something that most site admins think of.