What's the best way to approach linking to a site with limited bandwidth?

July 4, 2005 5:01 AM

What's the best way to approach linking to a site with limited bandwidth?
posted by handee to Etiquette/Policy at 5:01 AM (17 comments total)

Link to the link's equivalent Coral cache link, if available.
posted by Rothko at 5:03 AM on July 4, 2005

Just tell people not to click the link.
posted by Balisong at 6:07 AM on July 4, 2005

Nuke the site from orbit.
posted by loquacious at 6:33 AM on July 4, 2005

That is a pretty good definition of the effects of putting a link to such a site on Metafilter.
posted by caddis at 6:52 AM on July 4, 2005

I was going to suggest to coralize the URL also. I've been experimenting with it since I wrote about it, and it seems to work well, though any file over 50 megabytes won't work.

I have also read that some multimedia file types can't work with Coral, but I haven't find out whether this is true.

The biggest drawback to linking to a Coralized URL is that the recipient receives no pagerank for the link, so the MetaFilter mention -- and anyone else who copies the link -- won't help boost its standing in search engines.
posted by rcade at 7:05 AM on July 4, 2005

The biggest drawback to linking to a Coralized URL is that the recipient receives no pagerank for the link, so the MetaFilter mention -- and anyone else who copies the link -- won't help boost its standing in search engines.

One could, of course, link to both the original site and the Coral cache (in brackets)?
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 7:31 AM on July 4, 2005

Now that would be a nice gesture. As for some multimedia the coral site handles QT quite well but I'm not sure about shockwave or real type stuff, and it seems they keep the cache forever. The coral cache of early january posting of the VW suicide ad still works almost six months later! :)
posted by dabitch at 9:20 AM on July 4, 2005

dabitch: Given that the "cached" page has comments from June 11, I don't think that Coral works the way you think it does. It's certainly been refreshed within the last month.
posted by grouse at 9:41 AM on July 4, 2005

handee: How did you know the site has limited bandwidth?
posted by grouse at 9:52 AM on July 4, 2005

It's on Freeserve. The main URL is handled by a referrer which has the effect of just opening a freeserve page within a frame the size of the whole window.

For those who don't know - Freeserve started off as a dialup ISP where you only pay for the cost of phone calls. URLs of the form www.thingy.freeserve.co.uk are the ones which come free with the service. When I had one there were fairly severe bandwidth restrictions (for obvious reasons). Mine lapsed ages ago though so I could be a meringue. I thought it'd be nice to be careful anyway as I like the site (even though he's never published any of my photos).
posted by handee at 10:30 AM on July 4, 2005

so I could be a meringue
cool beans!
posted by andrew cooke at 10:40 AM on July 4, 2005

So I could be a meringue
Beaten stiff and baked?
posted by TimeFactor at 11:23 AM on July 4, 2005

Is there a Google cache of the site? If so, you could link to the main site and then the Google cache in brackets for when the inevitable meltdown occurs. Unless you can mirror it yourself without getting in trouble.
posted by dg at 3:21 PM on July 4, 2005

Coral works a hell of a lot better than Google cache, dg.
posted by grouse at 3:35 PM on July 4, 2005

Don't worry about it. No one clicks on that stuff anymore.
posted by yerfatma at 5:28 PM on July 4, 2005

grouse, I think the coral-cache works as long as people fetch it. That's about right innit?
posted by dabitch at 1:50 AM on July 5, 2005

dabitch, unless the original web site tells it to do otherwise Coral stores pages for 12 hours. You can get a Coral cache of almost any page available on the web.
posted by grouse at 5:28 AM on July 5, 2005