The Samurai Appliance Repair Man talks about the VOIP craze and his bad experience today installing Net2Phone on Windows XP. He also gives his opinion about another VOIP application he likes called Skype.
I don't know if it has to do with the time of year but some sites are talking about ways to save RSS feed bandwidth.
Scripting News: Another pet peeve is a low-level programming issue. There's no need to say isPermaLink="true" on the guid element in RSS 2.0 because true is its default value. In a typical feed this wastes about 2.2 percent of the bandwidth used by the feed.
But today I’m talking about another method (which should be used in addition to conditional Get): gzip compression.
The idea is simple: the server compresses the feed before returning it to your newsreader. This means less bandwidth is used because fewer bytes are transferred.
One of the nice things about this is that if a given newsreader doesn’t support gzip compression, a server will return an uncompressed feed, so you’re not locking anybody out. But it turns out that lots of newsreaders do support gzip compression, so it really is worth the effort. (Ted Leung has been maintaining a list of which newsreaders support it.)
Today I (finally) turned on gzip compression for my feeds. (Here’s a handy page you can use to check for gzip compression on any URL.)
Since my feeds are generated by PHP, I used Dean Allen’s super-easy instructions for turning on gzip compression. If your feeds are static files (which is probably the best choice) then you can probably use Apache’s mod_gzip or mod_deflate.
