Being a good bandwith neighbor

[Mandi]

So, with some of the dust settled (OK, for Deb and Andrew's sakes - ALL the dust, LOL) from What Will We Do About The Bandwith Week - I wondered if maybe some of the Old Hand Websters had some good pointers for us newer folks on things we can do to lower our consumption.

I live in South Texas (just for three more weeks, we were only here 13 months - gotta love life as a military spouse!!) and I view this sorta like water conservation - we certainly all "need" what we "need" - but I try hard not to waste water, where it is such a precious resource. It seems to me bandwith is sorta like that . . .

Bandwith things I am aware of and have shifted on my site:

-Graphics (file size) compression - ie, remove unused colors, etc. I have been using GifWizard www.gifwizard.com (http://www.gifwizard.com) but imagine I will learn how to do this by hand one day. (A project in progress, pending return of my laptop from the Dell hospital, but that's a WHOLE 'nother topic.)

-eliminate accidental links to http://mydomain.com and HTTP://WWW.MYDOMAIN.COM . . . to enhance use of browser caches.

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I am afraid that's all the tricks this new pup Webmaster knows . . . please toss in a few more if ya got 'em . . .

[Charles Capps]

Argh... I had a BIG reply to this typed up. Then PSP crashed when loading my fonts and took down the rest of the computer with it. >:-[

In short, I reccomend Adobe ImageReady - it's well worth the money. Progressive JPEGs are better than regular JPEGs, and making sure your HTML is optimal is a good idea. :-)

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"Okay, so I'm not "SANE" so to speak, but uh... I'm the lovable kind of psycho"
http://solareclipse.net/

[Mandi]

Okay, more questions on this topic -

In an effort to track my referring sites, I noticed my biggest referrer is http://MyDomain.Net - there are no internal links pointing this way accidentally, I checked VERY thoroughly - it's all http://www.mydomain.net. However, I do call the site like that as a sort of "proper name." An FQ friend let me peek at her stats - she is still in development, so her volume is much less, comparitively - and she has similar stats. Is a spider making these links? I did a bunch of searching around at the various search engine sites too . . . AltaVista's "real name" link does use the http://realname.net format - is there a better explanation for this?

In terms of bandwith and maximizing user cache - I would guess I am only talking about the first page a user sees, because by that first internal link clicked, s/he is back to my own preferred URL structure, but it's sort of maddening, where this is coming from?!