Boy ... I feel left out ... Googlebot has come by www.komar.org 2,006 times so far this week ... but not sign of the new Bot yet. I have very little Javascript (besides Adsense), but I doubt that makes much difference. The compression is a classic computer tradeoff - more CPU for less bandwidth - as Shawn points out, which is "cheaper" for you. I looked at this a long time ago, but may need to reconsider it - it is a good thing that the spiders are accepting of it. BTW, if you are running the Live HTTP Headers extension to Firefox you can see the browser/server negotiation and what is being run. Interestingly enough, while it looks like forums.digitalpoint.com is providing gzip'ed encoding, it does not appear that www.digitalpoint.com does (?)
I only do the PHP based stuff on www.digitalpoint.com (keyword tracker, keyword suggestion tool for example) because those are the high-traffic (and large) files.
I have read (more like skimmed) several articles on the pros and cons of using Gzip compression. Mostly technical trade-off stuff, but they are all over a year old -- and as you know one day in the computer world can make it obsolete. I think it will be pretty much mainstream to use it now. Server cpu speed has greatly increased, along with memory allocations. If you are on a good server, turn it on. The biggest advantage I see in using Gzip compression is not only your bandwidth, but the bandwidth of all the inline servers that your data is passing thru. Not to mention the end-users who may still be on dial-up (regardless of their cpu/memory usage).
Macromedia developed a Search Engine SDK a few years back. Google's built their own version (reported on searchenginewatch Feb 2003) that seems to have improved on it.
Hello SEbasic. An excellent overview of mod_gzip is at: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/compress/
SE - I know you are an avid CSS fiend. I thought of that and this thread when I came across this article on Gzipping your CSS. I am wondering why you would want to just compress CSS and nothing else, but it is still an interesting read.
Thanks for that Ron... Your right though - I'm not really sure why you would want to do that to a CSS file... Using it saves me a lot of bandwidth anyway I have been looking into this whole compression thing quite a lot recently (And been considering giving it a go as well, since the bandwidth for my blog suddenly jumped quite dramatically over the past couple of weeks)... I think that it is one of those things that I will give a go, I'm just not sure where or when yet... Have to say, I'm not keen on renaming my stylesheet to .php though... Interesting read nonetheless - bookmarked, and no doubt will be used in the future too Thanks for the link.
Ya think maybe we haven't seen an updated PR (display on toolbar) because G is/was working on the new bot? Maybe PR will go back to a monthly update? Just a thought...