Coral It!

Using Coral to Link Large Files
Keywords has created a handy tool for those of you that might want to link large files:I’ve created a handy bookmarklet you can use to instantly get the Coral version of a link. This should allow even the smallest of web content publishers to post lar…

I’ve always been under the impression that displaying media from other sites on your own site is leeching (some even call it stealing bandwidth!). The best way to do that is copy the media to your hard-drive and upload it to your server - then there is no leeching going on as the bandwidth is coming directly from your own server.

“leeching” refers to the practice of displaying media on your own site that is hosted elsewhere. This is sometimes encouraged, as with my automatically updated electoral vote counter on the right. However, this is not what I’m talking about here. Coral is a service which caches content for free. Caching is a practice by which content is distributed so that it places less of a load on one’s server. This is actually the opposite of leaching, in that Coral is hosting the content on their own servers. But not one individual server, as you suggest - a whole network of distributed servers that are linked together using P2P technology. I suggest you go to the Coral web site and read their documentation. Large companies use similar services. For instance, Apple owes a portion of Akamai which provides this service for all their web sites. Distributed caching speeds things up not just by caching the content, but also by hosting it on a server nearer the computer that is requesting it. So if you are loading a page from Korea, you will be served Apple’s content from a cache in Korea.

This has nothing to do with hosting content locally, but trying to avoid what is known as the “slashdot” effect, whereby a popular site linked to from slashdot will be shut down because links to that site are so popular throughout the blogsphere. Sorry if this is all a bit confusing, this is a bit over my head, so I hope I made it clear!

So, the next time a site you’re trying to access gets slashdotted, you can use this handy bookmarklet (drag it into your bookmarks and click it when you need it) to access the site via Coral. Credit for the bookmarklet goes to Keywords

[…] All forums [ Advanced search ] Forums » Opera Community » General Opera Topics » Wish-list » Coralize URLs Spotlight this forum topicgo to last postPermalinkFriday, 09 September 2004 02:26:29 UnbathedRegistered: Mar 2002Location: New York CityPosts: 144Coralize URLsCoral is a distributed free Content Distribution Network which helps prevent the “slashdot effect.” It provides a cacheing service running (today) on 400+ machines in 170+ locations. The user enters a Coralized URL, and the content is retrieved from the nearest cache.The syntax is to add “.nyud.net:8090″ after the domain of the URL. So “www.example.com/index.html” becomes “www.example.com.nyud.net:8090/index.html”.There is already an extension for Firefox / Mozilla which adds “Coralize this URL” to the right-mouse-button menu. My wishlist: Opera would support Coralized URLs.PermalinkPermalinkFriday, 09 September 2004 03:16:38 mu30286Registered: Jul 2004Location: Atlantis Posts: 382you can use this bookmarklet:http://keywords.oxus.net/archives/2004/09/04/coral-it/or create a new search with this url string:http://redirect.nyud.net:8090/?url=%s with a keyword, you can easily use Coral by entering the keyword in front of the url in the address bar.Permalink[ 1 ] Showing topic replies 1 - 1. Forums » Opera Community » General Opera Topics » Wish-list » Coralize URLsCopyright © 2005 Opera Software ASA. All rights reserved. Help | Contact | Privacy […]