July 30th, 2006
A few months ago I posted some screenshots of my desktop. I didn’t think many people would care about them, so posted them as quite high quality (150-250KB) pngs.
Recently Google Images robot indexed my site and deemed the Gnome Dress png worthy of going onto the front page of a search for “wallpaper”. Using the last six months I calculated the mean bandwidth/month: 725MB. July has so far consumed 3.37 GB. The logs show roughly 20,000 unique requests for that image.
It just goes to show that you need to be careful about optimisation, especially if you don’t care for the traffic that you are receiving. I wonder how many of those 20,000 unique requests transferred into views to other pages. At least some I would suspect, but I’m not sure the extra bandwidth to transferred visits ratio is worth it.
In the end I exploited the fact that browsers don’t care about file extensions, and changed the png to a jpg, compressed it, then just called it a png anyway so that the file that Google indexed was still available. Not many people realise that file extensions are largely pretty meaningless, a program would instead look at the header of the binary file itself, as can be shown by hexdump.
August 1st, 2006 at 5:27 pm
that all flew over my head haha…
bitches
and
hoes