The Blog of Harald

In the last week my blog traffic has gone from a sedate 4Mb/day to an average of 16Mb per day, with a peak last Thursday of 32Mb. A quick perusal of the logs shows that “this entry”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2003/08/17/blackout-satellite-images/ is extremely popular; it’s on the first page of Google for several obvious search terms. (My weblog is on the first page for several other interesting search terms too; I wonder what I’m doing to drive this?)

Anyway, while I was investigating, I looked at the per-page byte counts, using my nifty “MySQL-based Apache logs”:http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000407.html, and I discovered that an empty weblog posting here is around 26Kb in size! This is due to the sidebar (mainly the blogroll and the total word count), and then the HTML overhead. By the time you add in all of those little buttons, the byte count doubles.

Yikes! It’s a good thing that html compresses well, and that most browsers speak gzip; I have “mod_gzip”:http://webcompression.org/ installed, so the actual bytes_sent value is around 8K for most entries not including the buttons). I think it may be time to do some trimming.

There are some easy tricks that’ll get me 25% or so; remove the (superfluous) buttons; the humour is getting old anyway. Change or remove the total wordcount stuff, and trim the blogroll.

One gross hack would be to use frames, evil though they are; then most visitors would download the sidebar only when it changed, instead of for every entry. I don’t think that’ll really help much, since most of my traffic seems to be Google driven. Naughty googlers they are, too; the top traffic generators (after “blackout satellite pictures”) are still:

* “Female Nudity”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2003/01/06/female-nudity/
* “Trends in Playboy Models”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2002/12/20/trends-in-playboy-models/

Strangely, they’ve switched places from “the last time I looked”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2003/02/20/proving-once-again-that-its-all-porn-and-money/.

Anyway, I’m not too worried at this point. Even 16Mb/day isn’t much; we’re doing 8Mb/day of SMTP traffic in each direction…