UPDATE, 8:48 PM: Glenn has posted something new and long, bumping me down on InstaPundit’s homepage so that now you actually have to scroll to find me. This will presumably produce a bit of a drop in the incredible hit rate, which has been roughly one every five seconds since Glenn linked to me. Still, I’m rapidly approaching a thousand hits today… most of them in the past 90 minutes.

Another indication of the impact an InstaPundit link will have on a site: date_2003_02_02_archive.html, the page that contains the post that Glenn linked to, is now the second-most-viewed page ever in the history of my website, second only to my homepage.

UPDATE, 9:03 PM: My world just got 1,000th unique hit today! The historic hit came from a Mindspring user on a Windows 2000 computer who, like nearly 800 others in the past 90 minutes, followed a link from InstaPundit.

To put this in perspective: until October of last year, I had never received a thousand hits in an entire month. Presently, my monthly record is 2,531, which looks likely to be broken sometime tomorrow — just the third day of the month — or maybe even tonight before midnight. It depends on how quickly the InstaPundit traffic surge slackens.

Prior to today, my daily record was 135 unique hits. I had already broken that today, even before the InstaPundit link, thanks to a link from Jim Flowers. But I was on pace to finish with about 250 hits. Now I’m on pace for… well, I don’t even know. I seem to recall that my friend Andrew has gotten about 3,000 hits when he’s gotten “InstaBoosts” before. He predicts I’ll get a bunch of hits tomorrow, too, since Glenn linked to my site late in the day, and more people visit InstaPundit on Mondays. Well, we shall see. I’ll be very interested to analyze the statistics.

UPDATE, 9:15 PM: The surge has slackened a bit, as I expected. Between 7:27 and 7:45 PM Pacific time, when I was the top post on InstaPundit, I was getting 9.16 hits per minute. Between 7:45 and 8:19, when I was the second post — but still appeared on the homepage without any scrolling — I was getting 8.97 hits per minute, almost the same. But once I disappeared off the initial screen view — now I’m the third post, and you have to scroll down to see me — I’m getting 7.51 hits per minute (as measured between 8:19 and 9:12). Still, though, that’s a hit every eight seconds. Not bad. :)