According to query statistics from Google, the top search terms bringing people to this page are:
I really hope the people that search for “Cleaveland Steamer” are just trying to find out what it is because they heard it somewhere…
Most people are familiar with the Internet Archive, a project that aims to capture snapshots of the web among with public domain video and audio footage. Today while screwing around on their site I found a new, super-cool project named FreeCache.
The goal of the project is to ease large-file distribution through HTTP. Basically they have a bunch of servers running FreeCache software, and when an media publisher makes a link to the file in question they prepend the FreeCache server. So the link for http://www.neuro-tech.net/files/oneleg.avi becomes http://freecache.org/http://www.neuro-tech.net/files/oneleg.avi. Simple, right?
Initially if demand for the file is low, the servers will simply send a 30x redirect to the original URI. If the demand rises (currently past 2 or 3 hits since they’re testing the system) then the file starts to be mirrored across the FC servers. Then the redirect will occur and send the user’s browser transparently to one of the high-bandwidth mirrors. Very cool technology, and for legal files it certainly beats the hell out of BitTorrent. Theoretically you could even use this for image sources and what not.
Anyways, that’s it. Cool stuff, go check it out. The server side component is also free to download (and open source).
This is a tip to help speed up sites (as long as the server is Apache). Make sure you have mod_expire compiled in, then add this to the configuration file (httpd.conf):
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 6 month”
ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 6 month”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 6 month”
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access plus 6 month”
Once this is setup, restart Apache. Now the server will send images and style sheets (both of these types of files are usually large) with an Expires header. The header is set to 6 months after the user agent requests the object. People that frequent your site will notice a speed improvement since their browser will cache the aforementioned files. The only caveat is that if you modify CSS or image files you have to rename them and redo the links in your HTML code, but the tradeoff is worth it.