Tired of seeing a cool article on Slashdot only to have the the poor webserver it's hosted on burnt to a crisp by the tidal wave of traffic? People have been asking the /. mods to work on a solution for years to no avail. So some people took the initiative to create a mirror for the most recent stories at /. It's called Mirrordot and it captures the page before the server gets toasted and then hosts it for a while. Not sure how they're going to manage to handle the traffic only using donations, but it'll be great if it stays around. It's only in beta at the moment, but I don't know if that really means anything. It works, and that's what counts.
Another option for mirroring high demand content is Coral: the NYU Distribution Network. It uses peer to peer caching to store high demand content on all the participating cache computers. When a request is made for a high demand page, then there are multiple servers which can serve the content. All you have to do to use it is append .nyud.net:8090 to any URL you are having trouble visiting, and it'll throw you the cached version. I don't know how it updates the cache, and how recent the data is, but it has the potential to be useful. Just to show you how it works, you can visit my main page through Coral. Or even CNN, Slashdot, or even IMDb.
One more option for viewing content that you can't get to anymore is to try Google cache. Just search for cache: followed by your URL (no spaces) and it'll pull up the google cache of the URL. For example, here's Slashdot, in case it gets slashdotted... Pretty simple, but very useful.
Honestly, the slashdot problem has never been an issue for me. However, I'm sure this tip is helpful to the band of nerds that read your blog.
Posted by: Andrew at October 6, 2004 02:04 PMOMFG THATIS SOOOO 1337!!!!1111 THIS POST IZ TOTALLY TEH SHITAND IM GUNA UES IT ALL THE TIEM NOW! TAHNSK!!!
Posted by: Dan at October 6, 2004 03:18 PMDespite the fact you are responding the Andrew's 'band of nerds' comment, it'd be better if you toned it down a little, Dan =)
Posted by: Ram at October 6, 2004 03:35 PMThe scary thing is that Dan's comment is horribly authentic. Either he has a lot of practice or his exposure levels to that kind of nonsense are really high.
Posted by: G at October 6, 2004 06:18 PMOn a more serious note, I applaud Ram's continued efforts to post things that are actually useful to people. If being helpful were a requirement for blog entries, I'd still have an empty blog.
Posted by: Andrew at October 6, 2004 08:03 PM