Get to the MBTA's website ten times faster

By Brett on Tue, 02/01/2011 - 5:14pm

Can't get to the MBTA website? Use the automatic Coral content delivery network. Simply append "nyud.net" to the real website hostname for any site, like so: http://mbta.com.nyud.net/. This works for almost any URL.

The information does seem to be up to date; at 5:07PM one page I pulled up showed an alert from less than ten minutes ago. It's also significantly faster, as the main MBTA page loads in about 3-4 seconds via Coral. By itself, it's over 30 seconds.

Please help spread the word to other blogs, Facebook, twitter, etc- the more people that use Coral, the less load there will be on the MBTA's website, which means everyone wins. Bookmark mbta.com.nyud.net for the next snow emergency!

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The T

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MBTA

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Comments

Okay,

By ClariNerd617 on Tue, 02/01/2011 - 5:32pm.

it vaguely appears to use a slightly different IP address, so in the extremely unlikely event that the MBTA gets targeted by a DDoS, we can use this as a back-up!

Nope

By Kaz on Tue, 02/01/2011 - 6:52pm.

Coral/NYUD just gets a copy of the website and caches it for some determined period of time. It would be useless if mbta.com goes down completely if it can't get a new copy to refresh itself once in a while.

However, the mbta was putting up a secondary site with only alert info (link on the mbtaGM twitter feed). That would be your best bet if mbta.com goes blinky again.

the idea...

By anon on Tue, 02/01/2011 - 11:22pm.

"It would be useless if mbta.com goes down completely if it can't get a new copy to refresh itself once in a while."

The idea is to take load off the site so that it is less likely to do this in the first place. It'll also help with the people obsessively reloading.

On my connection, the

By SomervilleDJ on Tue, 02/01/2011 - 5:36pm.

On my connection, the official MBTA.com website loads significantly faster than the link posted above.

now it does

By Brett on Tue, 02/01/2011 - 5:42pm.

It's been up and down- at time of writing, the MBTA website was in fact taking half a minute or more to respond. They probably keep rebooting the server.

Also, the Coral CDN adjusts to demand- so as more people use it, it becomes faster for a particular individual site.

You can find them here also -

By happs on Tue, 02/01/2011 - 9:04pm.

http://www.massdot.state.ma.us/Transit/T-Alerts.aspx