WHAT a day this has been! I don’t think I’ve had quite this much blogging related excitement since I started blogging. Its not like its the FIRST time I got a high profile link. I’ve had a high profile link here and there that created what I thought was a big buzz. I’ve gotten stumbled a few times. I admit that I enjoyed watching my traffic counter spin and thought that was just loads of fun. Now I know that those were just minor league compared to what happened today!! Maybe some of you are accustomed to hundreds of thousands of people coming to your blog, but I’m not. My poor ol’ site meter is worn slap out.

Being a blogger, one of the first things I did when I logged on today was look at my site meter. Its an obsessive-compulsive ritual kind of thing I do. Well, my traffic was pretty high (for me) so I thought isn’t that nice. Of course, that lead me to looking to see where it was coming from. It turned out that Neal Boortz had linked one of my post on his front page. How cool is that!!! I was all excited.

I checked my stats again and the dadgume thing was just twirling as fast as it could. So I went back to my blog feeling quite pleased with myself and when I refreshed my site it wouldn’t load. And it wouldn’t load. And it wouldn’t load. I wasn’t getting THAT much traffic. I called my ISP and they said that they were doing emergency recovery. They said it wouldn’t be a problem, it was just a couple of thousand hits an hour, they just had to rearrange a few things. They said give them a couple of minutes and things would be back to normal.

I went and did some laundry and came back and this time my blog said my account was suspended. I started to call my ISP again but before I could my ISP called me. The tech supervisor called to tell me that I’d been Fark‘d!!!!! I had no idea because I wasn’t able to get to my blog. I told him to PLEASE get me back on line. He said almost 300,000 had tried to access my blog pretty much all at once and it had crashed the shared server Blue Star Chronicles is on which shut down 100 other blogs and websites. They had to shut mine down so the others could get back up. Okay, I understood that - but when would they get mine back up and how would they get mine back up. I ended up being on the phone with that poor guy for what seemed like hours while he shuffled things around so they could carry the load. Meanwhile, my site was down more than it was up during the biggest influx of traffic. That meant that I got none of the work done on it that I had intended to do today - but tomorrow is another day.

Long story short - we ended up putting the post that had gone ‘viral’ (does that traffic constitute viral?) on a plain html page and redirected traffic there so that I could get my blog back up. That of course, left me not getting the comments. You can read them here if you are interested.

The story has since been stumbled and is on numerous forums including the History Channel forum and I don’t know how many websites and blogs. All of them pale in comparison to the traffic that Fark brought here.

Of course, during the bulk of the traffic my blog was down, so I didn’t get to watch my site meter twirling around to all that traffic. But it was fun none the less.

The post that created so much interest was one I wrote about a week ago about the 80-year-old Green Beret who was court martialed for shooting an intruder. We created an html page to handle the load. You can read it here.

Since you can’t leave comments at that post due to the traffic being redirected to the html page, you can leave comments for Smokey Taylor here if you like, although there are a couple hundred comments at Fark about it.

If only I had to get used to that much traffic!!!

I’m just glad my little post helped in its small way to get Sgt. Smokey Taylor the attention and honor he deserves!!!