On my other blog One Man’s Wishlist, I’ve configured Wordpress to use Google’s ad proxy cache to serve my blog images. The setting to change is “Full URL path to files” under Settings->Miscellaneous:
The path needs to point to: http://gmodules.com/ig/proxy?url={path to your uploads folder}. The downside is that this setting will only apply to images inserted into new posts. Old images in posts will need to be changed using a search and replace plugin or manually.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about CDNs (content delivery networks) because of the challenges I’ve been dealing with user submitted photos on a highly trafficked site. Most projects I work on use Akamai with great success, but what about alternatives CDNs for personal projects? What first came to mind was Flickr. I mean why not? Flickr was built to serve photos so why couldn’t Flickr serve as a CDN for images on my site? The next thought that came to mind was Google. Google already caches websites and images, so why not use Google as a CDN? So I did a quick search and found a tutorial of how to write a Google Gadget that will cache images. Sounds perfect! Has anyone implemented this across their site? What are the caveats?
I also found this interesting P2P cache/CDN called Coral that is worth looking into.