CDN for Micro.blog blogs manton.org
@manton This is great, enabled for my blog now 🎉 Does this apply retroactively or just for new uploads?
@manton This is interesting and exciting - as being in Australia the load times of images has always been the one major sore point for me with micro.blog. I hope this might speed things up! I assume if one later unchecks the box, the process is reversible?
@manton Nice! Are the compression the same there, or will it serve uncompressed, but de-EXIFed photos?
@rknightuk Retroactively too. Might take a minute to update everywhere after first changing the setting, though.
@canion Yep, easy to disable. The checkbox effectively just changes the URLs used on your blog. Behind the scenes we're storing the uploads so they can be accessed at either your own domain name or the new CDN.
@manton Fantastic. Thank you for continuing to invest in and improve the service. I'm a happy customer today!
@odd Compression is exactly the same. I want to explore serving more photo sizes but for now that's unchanged.
@manton How exactly does it increase performance? Are the images being stored on different servers if you enable it? Eager to learn!
@jarrod Yes, different servers. If enabled, images are cached at the CDN from more locations around the world instead of at the core Micro.blog platform servers.
@manton Cool! Now, you said that if migrating to another blog host in the future, the personal domain URLs are preferred. But since it can easily be disabled, getting back to those URLs would be a simple as unchecking the box before starting a migration, right?
@manton Ok. Glad to hear. I wanted to clarify beyond the technical details. For me, it means - images will load faster :)
@manton This for me is an example of this conversation. I have the motivation to overcome my lack of tech knowledge here, but it might be something that could put some people off, or just cause them to give the feature a wide berth, even if investigation would cause them to benefit from it.
My question is, what is a Content Delivery Network, CDN, and how might this feature benefit me?
@crossingthethreshold Not the “techiest” of the group, but I believe it means that photos are stored all over the world and, when people access your blog, the one server that’s closer to the reader will take care of delivering the photos, instead of having them all coming from a single server, probably in the US.
The readers will notice the speed change, mostly if they’re located elsewhere (like I’m am). For photo-heavy blogs, like mine, it can mean actually looking at the photos, instead of giving up because they’re taking so long to load.
Is that it, @manton?
@crossingthethreshold Yeah, it's a good point... I often post things in my blog that are a lot more technical than what we'd put on the Micro.blog home page, for example. Which can be a problem when my blog feels like the official documentation!