The price of drama

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You only need to read this post only if you use a blog reader. We’ve made a few changes to reduce our bandwidth costs:

  • If you read our ‘without comments’ feed: Please switch to the  main feed. It no longer includes comments but does include the full text of the post.

  • If you read our main feed: Our feeds no longer include comments. Depending on your predilection for drama, this will either sadden or elate you.

  • If your blog reading service isn’t showing pictures: Let us know the Web address of your blog reading service (e.g. Bloglines), and we’ll make sure the pictures in our posts are displayed in that service.

  • If you republish our posts automatically: Please use the  feed for automated reblogging.

Technical details below.

Technical details: (thanks for the help, MadMan)

  • RSS and Atom feeds no longer include comments:

    Before: 50 comments each trigger a 250 KB reload, 12.5MB/reader/day
    After: 6 posts each trigger a 70 KB reload, 420 KB/reader/day

  • RDF feed now includes only post excerpts. This feed is now designed for automatic reblogging.
  • Blocked image leeching, except for services like Bloglines and NewsGator

5 thoughts on “The price of drama”

  2. Is it better or worse for you if I read you on bloglines? I don’t, but I could switch if it was better. I was thinking it would be better b/c all the blogreader would be grabbing from you would be the text and the pictures, not all the stuff on top and the site graphics, but I dunno. . .

  3. Razib:

    “[image leeching]….was a serious problem for my blog. there would be periodic enormous spikes….”

    Yes, no doubt coinciding with the posting of, say, an exceptionally complicated cladogram 😉

    Kumar

  4. Is it better or worse for you if I read you on bloglines?

    Makes little difference re: bandwidth because your Web browser caches the Web page and images. It only re-downloads them when they’ve changed, or if you manually force a refresh (in IE it’s Ctrl+F5).

    The only benefit is that Bloglines only refreshes hourly, but that also means you’d be reading the blog and comments on a delay.