Faster than the speed of light
I did a little bit of messing with this site a month or so ago.
I don't think anyone noticed, and if they did, they didn't say anything.
What I did was stick this site on a CDN.
What the blue blazes is a CDN, you ask?
I'm not really sure. By my understanding, it means there are copies of this humble little site scattered all around the world, so instead of seeing the site, you are actually seeing a copy which happens to be a lot closer to you than my little backwater here in the mountains. So for example, you nice people in Australia are probably seeing this site on a server in Sydney. Or Brisbane. Or Pyongyang. Or Calcutta. Or somewhere that is a bit closer to you than Wicklow.
What this is supposed to do of course is make the site a hell of a lot faster.
It's kind of difficult for me to see this site as a Chinese would see it without traveling to China, which I have no intentions of doing, so I have to rely on sites that do my testing for me. For example, a place called GTMetrix does a fancy analysis and gives me an AA Rating, up there with Google and Amazon but beating the shite out of Farcebook which only gets an FB [rather appropriately?]. I'm happy with that.
One little side effect that I wasn't expecting is that I get a shed load less spam. I don't know how they do that, but it's nearly worth the effort just to get rid of all those irritating fuckers with their Ugg Boots, fake watches and money making scams.
I have a graph in the engine room that shows the amount of spam coming in, and I took a picture of it a week or so ago –
Guess when I switched over?
So the big question is ……..
Do you think this site is fast? Or slow? Or what?
Do you notice anything different over the last few weeks?
Or am I sitting in my engine room twiddling my knobs for no reason?
Not noticed any difference here in the UK although I tend to read it mainly through feebly (dunno if that makes any difference)
Feebly? Feedly? The changes would refer to the site itself, not anything you might be reading it through [apart from the browser of course!].
My download speeds tend to be a little erratic and my server has just increased their speed approx 33% so must admit I hadn’t noticed in the past.
But as you’ve asked I certainly noticed an improvement today.
Previously your site had taken a little longer to download than average but I’ve always reckoned that the content made the extra few seconds worthwhile .
Just noticed my name and email at bottom of page are now blank although I doubt that will be connected if you made changes a month ago .
"I’ve always reckoned that the content made the extra few seconds worthwhile" Aw stoppit!
I haven't made any changes since, apart from cleaning a load of crud out of the engine room that wasn't even being used. I have been too busy doing nothing. The name/email thing is a browser thing all right. I'm having a few problems myself – half the time the little editing buttons in the comments aren't loading, but that's my browser too.
This site downloads about the same speed as any other site I go to, here in Australia or the UK. The pages download in seconds. I'd call it fast.
Just so long as it's fast, I'm happy. I used to get complaints that it was slow.
Do visitors to your site who live in Sydney and Pyongyang have to read everything upside down? In Pyongyang they might consider you to be hostile and press a red button.
Not only do they have to read it upside down but in Pyongyang they have to read it backwards. Maybe I should provide mirror versions for them?
Your CIA friends can do that for you, especially the guys in Room 20157 at Langley.
We have been monitoring his site for some time now. It is now housed on three of our servers around the world and how did you know what room we're in?
We know not to knock on the door of Room 666 at Langley. It has an end-of-world feel.
Your site is slower today but that's because there's a strong wind picking up here so you could go off altogether. Happens frequently. Need to tighten the elastic this end.
Could you look at yourself by using a proxy, say Pyongyang or Outer Mongolia or even Phuket? Cheaper than the air fare too tha' knows but they can be a bit strange. I settled on Maidstone Kent, UK once for the VPN and everything came up in Arabic?! And I thought my geography was bad.
Fair point about the proxy but I would probably get tangled up in my own defences and minefields that are there to trap a certain little shit.
If you want some really brilliant geography, few can beat our major telecoms provider.
Go into their broadband coverage map, and from the "Select a county", choose Wicklow at the bottom. I guarantee a surprise. 😀
Ha! Do you need a mobile home to move around Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany then and does it come with free broadband? It explains why its so expensive. I blame Brexit.
What worries me is how the fuck I ended up living in the Netherlands, Should I get a passport?
Of course it's Brexit's fault. Isn't everything, these days?
Listen, if Australia can get into Eurovision, Wicklow to the Netherlands is a piece of cake. In the interests of research I have just set my proxy to Bangladesh and your blog comes up faster than it does normally. And its in English.
Edit: would you look at that! I’ve got the stars and stripes not the Bangladeshi flag. Is everything on the move? WTF???
Hah! Like myself, you don't know where you are. I just nipped over to Moscow, and it's pretty fast there too. I'm happy and I don't give a damn where I am.
To be honest, your site has never seemed noticeably slow to me, and doesn't appear to be noticeably faster now. My 24 Mbps connection usually gives me about 12 Mbps download, which although not particularly fast is not too bad, so maybe that makes a difference? I don't really understand all this stuff. I'm on the laptop in Patras at the mo, using my mobile phone as a wifi hotspot, and just did a speed test, and I'm getting 12.13 Mbps down and 0.93 Mbps up with it, so about the same as at home. Whatever, I've never considered your site to be slow.
You're bragging again….. I was doing a spot of child minding yesterday down in the daughter's house and did a wee speed test. 45.06Mb down and 19.43Mb up. As of a minute ago I'm getting 2.92 down and 2.1 up. Still, I suppose it's better than dial up?
Since I started mainlining teh Google a while back, everything* is fast: gigabit is like that.
However I'd be thrilled to say I've noticed your place has been cfaster the last couple of weeks.
* The exception to that, ironically enough, is blogspot blogs; now and again those bastards lock up and neither lover nor money will unfreeze them.
Great! So someone noticed the difference which makes it all worth while. I never liked Blogspot for some reason. I don't know why people sign up for them.
Someone downloaded my brain and I can't find it any more lol.
It's a bitch when something so small gets lost like that. Have you tried a microscope?
Maybe an electron microscope?
A device with the power of the Large Hadron Collider?
It would need to be… 😉
snot fair you takin the piss, I can't help being fick.
No change here, but your site was always quite quick anyway. But the reduction in spam must be a real blessing for you, Gramps! Mind you, you'll miss out on those million-dollar diamond-importing opportunities from Nigeria, now!
To be honest I'm really not that bothered about spam on the site. It's mostly those fawning comments that try to flatter me into letting them past so they can a) promote their site and b) start loading the site with their advertisements once they've got in. You know the kind of shit – "Just came across your site and I find the information in it amazing! How do you do it?". I would be mildly flattered if I thought they meant a single word, which they don't.
The great thing about spam is that I can clear it out with one click without even reading it.
For what it's worth your site loads very quickly in South Africa. About the only thing that works well in the turd world….
I had better move to South Africa so. Except that I probably wouldn't be able to lay my hands on a decent pint of stout or a pack of Condor pipe tobacco. I remember once getting a present of a pound [weight] of tobacco from there – it was lovely!