The Coral Distribution Network (CDN) is a very nice shiny toy for all of us who sometimes struggle with limited bandwidth. Let the NSF pay for it!

My photo album is what chews up the most bandwidth from my site, so it made sense to rig it up first to optionally be available via CDN. CDN is basically just a big Akamai-like network of servers that cache things and serve them up to you from servers that are close to you network-wise. It is has some fancy code behind it, but who cares how it works, it just does. Let's get to the interesting part. As you have probably figured out by now, you can access any site on the Web via Coral by simply appending ".nyud.net:8090" to the domain part of the URL and there are plugins available that add a menu item to automatically do this for you client-side. The problem with this is that you don't want to have to do this for every page on a site. It would be much nicer if the site would adjust its links such that if you enter the site via Coral, all the local links from that site would be Coral links. You may of course want to make some exceptions for pages that are interactive in some way, but for something like a photo album where 99% of people just look at mostly static content it works well.

You can see the patch at http://gallery.menalto.com

Note again that this quick hack does not in any way handle links that shouldn't be Coral'ed. Like the login link, comment stuff or all the administrative tools. It turns your Gallery into a read-only site if you come in using Coral. As the administrator of my album I can figure out that I need to go directly to it in order to add photos. But a more complete patch that doesn't Coralize stuff that shouldn't be would be nice.

You can have a look at it in action at http://www.phpics.com.nyud.net:8090/

I submitted it to the Gallery Folks so let's see if they take it and run with it to integrate it completely.

Update: A variation of this that also supports people running their Gallery on weird ports has been committed to Gallery's CVS, so you may just want to update from there to get it.