If you were having trouble accessing a page at ljworld.com Tuesday, you can thank the Drudge Report.

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

Dean roars into town (02-26-05) The Drudge Report

The Drudge link was titled “DNC Dean Says Republicans are ‘Evil’ . . .,” which directed readers to a J-W story titled “Dean roars into town.”

Dean was not quoted in the story directly calling the GOP evil. He told fellow Democrats, “This is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.”

After Drudge linked to the story, Journal-World servers almost immediately began to pull in overwhelming traffic.

“Generally, traffic spikes of up to 10 to 15 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. Tuesday, the story had been accessed more than 101,000 times from the Drudge Report Web site.