Slashdotting hurts

A few days ago, my article on GMail vs. Pine was posted to Slashdot. Soon after, it was posted to Digg, Reddit, and other geek news sites.

The torrent of traffic quickly brought my poor little server to its knees. I tried bringing it back up, but the flood of visitors put it right back down again. I had no choice but to wait until the story ran its course and fell off the Slashdot front page. My hosting company was not amused.

So, apologies for the outage. On the plus side, it generated a lot of comments. Digg user oltompic posted my favorite:

IT'S JUST E-MAIL !!!

read your e-mail and send your e-mail. holy shit.

Eloquent in its simplicity. I can only hope to achieve to such a Zen outlook on life, liberty, and the pursuit of email nirvana.