Dear Inkscape Developers,
In a happy Christmas time result, the issues we've been having with the very kind free CDN service from fastly.com have been ironed out and now I'm pleased to announce that inkscape.org is up and running with the new caching service effective imediatly.
So what does this mean?
Firstly, the configuration for our service has changed so django content[1] (which are NOT cached) will always redirect to https from http and will always redirect www.inkscape.org or the machine's ip-address to just inkscape.org.
But this redirect does not apply to media, docs or static content. This content can be served up either http or https and from any combination of ip-address or domain. This was done to enable the caching services machines to read these files without issue. The website would always request content via https itself though.
All images, javascript files and css files which are considered 'static content' are served via /static/ are still available directly but the site is configured to now request these via fastly caches.
All uploaded images to the cms, resource files in your gallery, profile pictures and other 'media content' is also available directly and is also configured to request via fastly. This means that if you have uploaded an image with a name, deleted it, has the server clean away the old filename /and/ re-uploaded a new and different version within the one hour caching time, your images may not be updated. But this is such an unlikely and rare occasion that I mention it only for completeness.
Uploaded version of inkscape binaries - Because the media content is now cached, downloading the inkscape pre-compiled binaries won't incur the very high penalties if they all went directly from the webserver. So we may now be able to host all our own downloads. This is good for getting up off sourceforge.net and be able to cope with the demand.
I'm interested in suggestions on how we can stress-test the new system to make sure it will be able to cope with a new release if we decide to use it this way.
Best Regards, Martin Owens