« Temple Stampede
UTMB Outcome; UTSW Invite »

You love Google. I love Google. We all love Google. Even you, Mr. Executive of Yahoo, have secretly Googled something in your free time. It’s a company rooted in innovation and open source projects. Not to mention, their robust network blankets the world with ridiculously fast search results. I decided to use their servers as a content distribution network to power this site across the Internet.

Andreas Krohn at Digitalistic wrote a fantastic article regarding how to do just this. Using Google’s AppEngine utility (currently in beta testing), users are able to publish files to Google. Since these files can be referenced via a static link, this service can be used to distribute website content (cascading style sheets, images, etc.) to users. In principle, content distribution networks have many outlets throughout the world. Therefore, users from virtually any country will always be “near” the host site, whether they live in Asia, Europe, or America (in this case, wherever Google servers operate).

What’s the whole point of doing this? Well, besides impressing the ladies, it basically speeds up the website a few notches. That’s why I did it. In my pursuit of a simplistic and fast website, I thought that a CDN would be something I could implement to a.) learn something, and b.) accomplish the aforementioned goal.

Legal

As a third year medical student at Baylor College of Medicine, my posts are intended to educate others and share my experiences from this incredible journey without violating patient privacy at all costs. These blurbs are not to serve as a replacement for recommendations provided by licensed physicians under any circumstance.