Software for Humans

This week we took a big step for our blogging application and started using a content delivery network (CDN) to serve most of the "static assets"--files like images, CSS, and JavaScript that don't change very often. A CDN is a set of interconnected data centers that are placed all over the world, each caching files and delivering them to geographically nearby web browsers.

CDNs are a boon for website performance for a number of reasons:

Compendium Blogware's web servers no longer bear the burden for serving the files.
The files are replicated all around the world, making the files download much faster than if it was served from a single server.
Since CDNs have multiple data centers, they are more robust in the face of network outages, etc.

I thought it was pretty cool that our company can do this, but what about my personal website? I figured there would be no way I could afford CDN hosting, but I discovered a post by Matt Riggott on 24 ways that explains how I could use Google's App Engine service as a poor-man's CDN without having to pay a cent. There are some limitations and hoops to jump through to get things running, but Matt's instructions are very thorough, and you can't beat the price.

Matt Riggott's article: Using Google App Engine as Your Own Content Delivery Network