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Thanks for Your Patience

[Update:   What happened?  I discovered the extraordinary power of Digg.com.  Someone liked this post and put it on Digg, and  the entry  ended up getting 1900 diggs, even making it to Page One.  Other chatrooms in France, Spain, Japan, and elsewhere picked it up next.  I ended up getting over 50,000 hits on that one post over the course of about 4 days (by comparison, an Instalanche is usually worth between 2,500 and 3,500).  All I can say — to any of you who added “diggs” of your own — is thank you very much.  There’s no doubt that you contributed to tens of thousands more people understanding the importance of this issue.  Since I don’t see a dime from this vocation, despite the investment of many hours,  it’s nice to see it have some occasional impact.  Again, thank you.  To the new visitors, welcome and stop by regularly.]

This site is experiencing exceptionally high traffic and I fully expect it to crash a few times today.  I don’t believe it’s a hack attack; it’s just all the traffic coming in from Digg to see this post.  Bluehost has been great; I ended up on the phone with them several times, and they even upped my bandwidth a notch.  They assure me it’s not the size of the images, as I suspected.  There are just a lot of you coming in.

So … welcome!

6 Responses

  1. that is actually VERY good news. glad to hear you are having ‘problems’ with too many people coming in to view it.

    hopefully some of those people have influential position to actually help make a difference.

    like maybe creating a public relations stir about China sending back NK refugees with hooks through their noses and/or wrists.

    that would be great to see China crumble in the face of western opinion.

    like when SARS came along and they were just lollygagging around giving BS excuses. ‘oh, it’s contained. everything is fine. go home everyone.’ and then the WHO director straight up told the Chinese, ‘you have just won the Olympics. don’t f*ck around.’ next thing you know, they are cooperating with western standards.

  2. You can blame me for digging you. I was the guy that posted your story on digg, as I just *had* to get it out to wider audience.

    sorry for the increased traffic, but at least a heck of lot more people now know about this (and can see it for themselves on Google Earth).

    Good work on your part though.

  3. You’re sorry? I’m at over 40,000 hits today alone. Print a copy of this and it’s redeemable for three glasses of the beer of your choice.

  4. Joshua,
    I recommend the plug-in WP-Cache to help reduce server load. Normally each request for a page results in an SQL database query. With the amount you traffic the escape post has brought you, that’s a lot of db queries. WP-Cache results in the db being accessed less often and reduces the load;

    http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/wp-cache-2/

  5. you can also turn on cacheing in MySQL itself (MySQL 4 and upwards) – that really does give a huge performance boost.