TechgnosisWeb Prime

Hey there folken… there’ll be another podcast up a bit later today, I just finished taping it this morning on the way to work. I’ll also be trying something kinda interesting with this podcast: distributed mirroring.

As you know, I’ve previously talked about some concerns with possible bandwith problems with podcasting. In short: the more popular you get, the higher your bandwith costs. A few solutions have been suggested, from using bittorrent to commercial services such as libsyn.org. But recently I ran across something interesting that I don’t thinkg I’ve seen many people even mention or talk about: a podcast that was being distributed through Coral. To quote from Coral’s site:

Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem.

Publishing through Coral is as simple as appending a short string to the hostname of objects’ URLs; a peer-to-peer DNS layer transparently redirects browsers to participating caching proxies, which in turn cooperate to minimize load on the source web server. These volunteer sites that run Coral automatically replicate content as a side effect of users accessing it, improving its availability. Using modern peer-to-peer indexing techniques, Coral will efficiently find a cached object if it exists anywhere in the network, requiring that it use the origin server only to initially fetch the object once.

Bascially, all you do is add the string ‘.nyud.net:8090′ to the end of the domain for the download or website you want to be automatically mirrored, and that’s all. People don’t need to download plugins or learn how to use new software, you don’t have to install anything on your own server, it’s simplicity itself. Just do this:

If your link looks like this:
http://www.techgnosisweb.com/podcast.mp3
All you have to do is add ‘.nyud.net:8090′ to it, like so:
http://www.techgnosisweb.com.nyud.net:8090/podcast.mp3
… and that’s all! When people click on the link, or iPodder picks it up from the RSS feed, Coral takes care of automatically mirroring your content into its network the first time it’s requested, and every other time it’s requested, the content gets distributed throughout its network of mirrors, thus distributing the bandwith load away from your server. Really cool! And to top it all off, it’s completely free and easy to use, you don’t need to sign up anywhere or pay anything to have it mirror your stuff. I’ll be trying it with today’s podcast.. let me know if you notice any hiccups.