If you were having trouble loading a page from ljworld.com today, you can thank the Drudge Report.

About 9 a.m., the Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com) put a link on its front page to a Journal-World story about Friday’s visit to Lawrence from Howard Dean, the former presidential candidate who is now chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

The Drudge link is titled “DNC Dean Says Republican are ‘Evil’ . . .,” which takes you to a J-W story titled “Dean roars into town.” (Note: Dean’s quote in the story didn’t say the GOP is evil. He told fellow Democrats, “This is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.”)

The J-W Web site immediately began getting requests for that story, which began putting a load on the Web site’s server, where the story resides.

“Generally, traffic spikes of up to 10 to 15 times times our normal load do not cause any problems” said Jacob Kaplan-Moss, programmer for World Online. “This morning we hit 200 times our normal load. We immediately began serving a high-traffic version of the page, which has everything stripped from the page but the story content.”

Kaplan-Moss said that as of 3 p.m., the story had been accessed more than 101,000 times from the Drudge Report Web site.

World Online developers and programmers have dealt with the increased load to that story, restoring page responses to their normal speed, Kaplan-Moss said.