I had no idea the impact that my little Lord of the Rings parody of anti-war protests would have. In the past 24 hours, I have thousands of hits on my poor web server. (For those who don’t know, this site runs on my old G4 Mac over my cable modem connection.) While the server may have slowed, it never stumbled before the onslaught. There are varying levels of response to linked blogs which have various effects:
There’s the Mark Shea/Amy Welborn Effect, whereby if they link to you your server gets hundreds of hits from the numerous readers of St. Blogs. That was the first wave. Then there is the National Review’s The Corner effect. If they link to you, which they did (thank you Rod Dreher), you get thousands of hits from their hordes of readers. By extension, many of those readers then provide links and it spreads, perhaps not exponentially, but arithmetically. (I hope I said that right; I not good at numbers and math-counting stuff.) Among them was Oxblog which sent many more links my way.
After that came the Instapundit effect. The Grand Blogger himself, Glenn Reynolds, linked to the parody and thousands more hits came pouring in.
The only way it could have been more overwhelming is if Matt Drudge linked to me on his page or Rush Limbaugh mentioned it on his show. Whew! That would surely have taken the server down.
And then there was the flood of comments, which I’ve tried hard to keep up with. I fear I’ve had to let some commenters speak for themselves and had to refrain from posting when I wished I could because of time contraints.
On top of all that, I had to finish the magazine for deadline today. Double Whew!
I hope to get some regular posts in later.
