The above image appeared on FFFFOUND! last night. The description of the link implies a meaty 2000x1351px version — but the owner of the site from whose upload folder this was linked, a Netherlands blog called Sargasso has evidently noticed the bandwidth suction that must accompany such a very tasty FFFFOUND posting, and hasn’t taken kindly to it, as can be seen from the image which greets the visitor following the link:
Really. Assuming this is a panic measure to deflect a slashdotting, it seems to me that the Sargasso owner should learn not to host a big-ass image file on his or her own server, when there are approximately nine million on-line storage outfits just clamoring to host your shit. How this image came to be findable in that location in the first place, is the question. Context suggests it was called by a blog post, and I haven’t been able to find it, although I’ve not searched very thoroughly. If it exists, it would have been better to have linked the FFFFOUND post to it (am I sick of typing FFFFOUND? FFFFuck.). But all the same.
Just now I’ve located a copy of the high resolution image, newly uploaded to Flickr, but so far, the image has floated free of its attribution. It looks very much as though it belongs to a set of pictures I recall seeing sometime maybe early this year, showing New York being reclaimed by the biosphere following the (unexplained) departure of humanity. So, if anyone recognises the above, a note in the comments would be appreciated.
It wasn’t Slashdot, it was Reddit and stumbleupon that caused the traffic (and some smaller sites). In total 130.000 additional hits on the picture alone, resulting in over 100Gb additional traffic. All in just under three days time.
Yes, you can host your picture on other sites. But most of the time they don’t give us the performance we want or the give you all kinds of unwanted stuff.
We had an original post in which this picture figured, but it was taken down as well. This was partly due to the fact that someone pointed out that we might be in violation of some copyright (although we still haven’t figured out the source of the picture).
But the original post found it’s way into the international community and then somebody link directly to the picture only.
This way we found out a bit late that we had additional traffic (it circumvents our most used counters) and were too late to set up a smaller version and activate the cache.
One of the editors hates leeching, so he put the shown version in place.
Hopes this explaines a bit of the background.
One more thing. Another reason we host the pictures ourselves is that we like to have the archive complete. The blog is already running almost 6 years now. And most file-hosting sites have come and gone since then or cleaned up stuff. We want things still to be available in 10 years time. Only one way to be sure.
hi steeph, thanks for commenting.
I take your point about wanting to be sure that the images would be available in the future. That was the reason I hosted all the images for enthusiasm for the first few years. Last year though, I moved them all into my LJ account, and called them from there. Flickr would do equally well. It was a pain to have to go through the whole blog, changing the image links, but the code I’d used for images had varied a bit over the years, and so it needed tidying up anyway.
It’s true that some day, LJ or Flickr may not exist anymore, although in neither case, considering they are now owned by Six Apart and Yahoo, are they likely to disappear in the foreseeable.
If LJ *was* to disappear, I’d have to go through it all again. Hopefully, if this was ever to happen, I’ll be sufficiently adept at database tinkering that I’ll be able to change the paths of all the image tags with a script, rather than doing them manually.
We talked about the Flickr option recently. Because they look to be in it for a long time.
But we won’t go through our history and migrate them. Since we are a collective of bloggers (some 20+) we’ve written well over 10.000 posts. It would take me half a year to get through that. Bit too much trouble for a failsafe mechanism.
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the picture is by François Baranger.
his website: http://www.francois-baranger.com
his comic books (BD’s) are very good.
i am from holland and around here the sargasso blog does not have a good reputation, rather pedantic.
a bunch of “we know it all” people.
a bunch of “we know it all” people.
I’ve noticed a tendency to sound that way online myself and it’s (mostly) unintentional – I think it comes from being quite enthusiastic about things I’m interested in and wanting to discuss them with other enthusiastic people.
man do I need to preview. Sorry pilgrim.
fixed that for you, and don’t even ask what I’m doing fixing code at five in the morning…