Navelfluff CDN engaged

A while ago, i caught a jaiku from Jonasl regarding Simple CDN, a Content Delivery Network which is (duh) Simple. Simple to register to, simple to implement and, perhaps most importantly, simple to maintain.

So why use a CDN? Well, basically there are three reasons:

• Efficiency. Let your back end server do the processing-intensive bits and leave serving out static content to a dedicated workhorse with a phat pipe.
• Money. It’s/you’re cheap.
• Geeky. It can be done, so why not. And your next door blogger hasn’t got CDN yet, unless s/he’s on a hosted blog.

Me? I went for the geeky and cheap. And here’s how i enabled CDN for my Wordpress blog:

1. Register an account at SimpleCDN and jump through the one step confirmation mail hoop.
2. Register a “bucket” which will represent your stuff served from the CDN. I chose a Mirror bucket with a S3plus back end. A mirror bucket will populate itself and maintain its content without your intervention and the S3plus option is the cheaper one.
3. Optional fluff: Create a DNS CNAME record to point cdn.yoursite.net to yourbucket-options.simplecdn.net. In my case, cdn.navelfluff.org points to navelfluff-s1.simplecdn.net, where the s1 option enables gzip and fairly sensible expiration headers.
4. Get and install Yejun Yang’s MyCDN Wordpress plugin. Configure CSS, themes and Javascript with the “pre-url” above, i.e. http://yourbucket-options.simplecdn.net (or the prettier cdn.yoursite.net). No trailing slash in the pre-url!
5. Hit Reload on your site. View the site’s source code to make sure everything’s in place.
6. Rejoice.

That’s it. Your CSS, theme files and Javascript will be automagically slurped to SimpleCDN and served from there. Nothing to do further but to rejoice your increased geekdom.

Sure the solution could be improved. I’ve read that Amazon’s Cloudfront is way more efficient than Simple CDN, but with my traffic, who cares. In my world, this is just enough.