the corner office

One of the nice things about being hosted at DDN is that I have access to all sorts of cool stats about my site. I was always too lazy to do any real analysis of my site's traffic at my blog's former home, but DDN does it all for you.

What surprised me the most is the amount of bandwidth that my wee site generates. I've blown about 140MB of traffic this month. It's still way down on the 1GB quota that DDN gives me, but that's still a lot of data. This got me to thinking about ways to keep things leaner.

First - the majority of the bandwidth being chewed up is from my RSS feeds. The average size of my all-stories RSS file is about 15k. That's fairly big, because I include the full text of my posts in my RSS feed (and because I ramble on incessantly in my posts). Some bloggers do this (post the full text, not ramble), some just include excerpts or notifications with a URL in their RSS feeds. I enjoy being able to read others' posts without having to click through to their sites (no offense...), so I'll do the same and keep the full text going for a while.

That does underscore a theme that a number of people have touched on, namely that RSS and syndication in general wastes a lot of bandwidth. If you want to do your bit, sign up with someone like Bloglines. Need I point out that what is really needed in place of the "read everything and do a delta check" way that syndication now happens, is something more like Notes-style replication of blog items?

Second - I don't think too many people visit my home page directly, but those that do are forced to load up a 35k web page. Taking a look at the culprits, there are three things that jump up:

1. Extraneous crap - my blogroll adds nearly 4k of text to every page. Is that a lot? Well, no - but it's still redundant text. Are there good reasons for displaying one's blog roll on each page? Does Google care? Is it polite, or just the way things are done? To me, the real flattery is probably linking directly to someone's site from a post, not just listing them in a blogroll of 50 people. Would anyone think it rude or bad blogging etiquette to keep the blogroll on a separate page, as some others do?
   
2. Heavy markup - every blog entry generates a little over 400 bytes of markup with divs and classes and the like. 15 blog entries on the home page means a good few kilobytes of text. I could look at tidying up the markup a little, or else I could...
   
3. Cut down the number of articles on the home page. If I'm anything to go by, I almost never look at the articles further down a person's blog page. It depends on how often non-RSS-using readers visit one's page, but I currently keep the last 15 items, which works out to about 2 weeks' worth of posts. I think that's a bit much. Perhaps I should drop that to 10 or less? As long as it's easy to follow links to earlier posts, it shouldn't matter too much, should it?

I guess some site upgrades will be in order once I'm through my mountain of assignments. Watch this space...