Theorem: a watched access.log will never show the initial flood of hits from freshmeat.
Proof: trust me on this one. It just doesn't happen. It is invariably the case that whenever you post an announcement, there will be a mysterious editorial outage which will leave freshmeat stranded for hours.
In fact, it's also invariably true that the outage lasts just long enough for you to give up waiting and go to bed, and then, bare minutes later, your web server starts shuddering under the load. Of course, when your web server is a 486 with 8 MB of RAM, this is not altogether uncommon in any case.
Furthermore, publically whinging about the situation on a web page also appears not to help.