Friday, 20 January 2006 - 12:10 PM EST

BW does not reset monthly. It resets at least daily. A *month* of BW means what is used in the last 30 days with "today" the last day of the *month*. The first day of the "month" is 30 days ago from "today". As time marches on, so does the "month". The first day of the "month's" BW use is erased and replaced by what is used "today". You can see BW go either up or down depending on the net loss or gain of BW use from what was used today in comparison to what was used on the day that was replaced and erased.

There are also hourly and daily BW limits so all your BW is not used at one time. In this way your site may only be down and unavailable for a couple of hours instead of days or weeks if it were to be reset on a static calendar month basis. Confusing I know but about as well as I'm going to be able to explain it.

Friday, 20 January 2006 - 4:08 PM EST

If excess BW use is a problem for you then consider doing more to optimize your graphics. Graphics and other media files are usually the big BW eaters. This is where downsizing can have a big impact. I hope you don't mind but I'd like to make a few suggestions.

Because your graphics look like scanned images to me you probably have all the hardware and software needed to produce smaller file sizes. There are a number of things that could be done to produce much smaller file sizes.

First I think I would rescan your images. Read the link above about scanning printed pages and try the Lineart and/or Grayscale modes to see which produces the most clear images. The link above is mostly about scanning images for printing which is a lot different than producing web images but there are still helpful tips. The following linkis about grayscale http://www.scantips.com/basics4f.html

Your goal is going to be to produce a limited palette black and white image or one that uses B&W and a handful of grays. Once you have scanned a clear image, use your image editor to crop out all the dead space (the blank areas that surround your text) in the scanned image. The smaller the actual physical dimensions of the file, the less memory that will be needed to produce the final image. Just taking away that dead space will cut many KB off your final file sizes.

If you've gotten that far then I would then save the images as GIF not JPG. GIF works very well in situations where there are limited colors and will produce smaller files than JPG under those conditions. I would expect you could cut jpg file sizes that are now 30-60 KB down to file sizes of 5-10 KB if rescanned and saved as limited palette gifs. Gif is also a non lossy format so will be able to take further editting without loss of image quality should you wish to resize the images again later. Jpg is a lossy format, meaning info is thrown away each time a jpg is editted and resaved. Image quality suffers with each jpg resaving.

When producing web image files make sure their physical dimensions in pixels exactly match the size you intend them to display. If you want to display images at 350 pixels wide then make sure the images are 350 pixels wide before uploading them. Files physically sized larger than display size will require more memory than needed and will waste BW.

I know that sounds like a lot of work but the BW savings can be dramatic. If you cut 40 KB off a formerly 60 KB image you'll save 40KB of data transfer or BW EACH time that file is viewed. So a 20 KB image can be viewed 3 times for the same amount of BW the old 60 KB image took for just one view. The more visitors you have viewing that new smaller image the more you'll save in data transfer or BW.

Hope that makes a little sense and helps some.

Friday, 20 January 2006 - 4:37 PM EST

Thanks ,cw.
I took a digital pic in 3MPix \\resized\\ cropped.
I must watch the pic clearity. So far I can bear with the
storage & BW angekfire provides. If I face problem later ,I
will follow your steps.
There are so much to learn in HTML,blog,BW, storage....
I want to let it sit for awhile to test out the system.
I have so many questions in mind.
I also have to reread the HOW TO part ...

In the last 6 months, I used blog \\insert pic\\ video\\sound\\scanning pages.... It was so easy until I fouled up
my blog. I will have to learn how to get back to the old way. Now I got stucked. I will post to ask again.
Thanks again.
sy