Bandwidth Dreams
I lay awake last night after I posted my audio blogs below thinking about 500k of audio files being downloaded anytime someone simply browsed my web page. Seriously, I was dozing and thinking to myself "Why isn't streaming media more common? Oh, yeah... it's petty bandwidth heavy..." Then I started doing calculations of the bandwidth for 2000 hits on my blog x 500k of audio files and almost got up at 4:30 a.m. to get rid of the object tags to make them just simple links. I didn't though, thinking to myself that it won't hurt to wait until I can get to work in the morning and do it then...
At least one person was affected tho! Huw, the Brit in Australia emailed me last night with this funny bit:
hi Russ
i'm on a dial-up and pay for excess bandwidth. your notepad is a frightening place today. perhaps you could put a warning up about those mp3's downloading themselves in the background. make the warning stand out with blink or marquee tags or even a neon animated .gif!
seriously, i realise you are experimenting and that many photoblogs use just as much bandwidth, but i do think that it is a very significant point to consider about audio-blogging. i do visit photoblogs, but i do it occasionally and consciously. i visit quite a few blogs daily, but probably every single one has a front page that is less than 50K - in entirety, not just the latest post. broadband is spreading, but i don't think it is possible to underestimate the speed at which it is doing so.
i love the idea of preloading images 'behind' thumbnails, but at the moment don't think it is suitable for a front page. likewise mp3's, experiments aside.
these are just thoughts, not moans. keep on having fun.
bye for now,
huw
It's fixed now. I think I got spoiled having ADSL "en casa" and wasn't thinking about the poor guys still on dial-up. Especially those paying for extra bandwidth (what a rip!). I changed the posts to be just links now - I ripped off the graphic from NPR (hey, my taxes helped pay for that gif!) and added the href link... I'll go back and edit my "how to" post in a second too... ;-) Sorry about that Huw!
-Russ