It looks like you get 1440 extra minutes. And you can blame Presidential candidate (in South Carolina) Stephen Tiberius Colbert. From the DonorsChoose blog:
…our site was flat-out overwhelmed by the massive traffic that resulted from Stephen Colbert and Craig Newmark’s announcement around midnight on Thursday, October 18.
As we scrambled to increase capacity, we continued to receive big spikes in web traffic from the re-airings of that Colbert show on Friday, October 19 in the morning, afternoon, and early evening, and across US time zones.
Since no new Colbert episodes were airing last week (October 22-26), Comedy Central re-ran the previous week’s episodes! These additional re-airings generated many more big spikes in web traffic, mostly in the 24 hours starting on last Wednesday at midnight: between daily re-airings and the staggered showings across time zones, we think the Colbert show that introduced DonorsChoose.org may have aired between 3 – 9 times during that 24 hour period. Amazing.
This was GREAT news for the teachers who use DonorsChoose.org to get much-needed resources for their classrooms. But not so great for our web servers.
The DonorsChoose tech team think they have a healthy, happy system again. And it’s looking like the “last minute” of the 2007 Blogger Challenge is being moved to the very last moment (11:59:59 PM) of November 1, Eastern time.
In light of this new information, I leave it to you to decide what to do. I’ll just point out that even hard-core procrastinators are not required to wait until the last possible moment.
Colbert is dangerous.
Gee, that’s what I get for not reading this post first.
I thought we were already at the nth hour and as I could not get in to the site to do it last night because of the traffic I just donated on your challenge. We’ll send our picture/poetry topics along with the receipts (’cause I know the Sprogs will demand proof, even or especially from us).