Okay, I see that I sucked the fun out of it :P
At some point you have to question whether you're being too stingy with bandwidth. Particularly when easter eggs like this could potentially bring you a few new visitors from the free advertising that happens when your site is discussed on blogs and forums like these.
But if nothing else; I think fun should be encouraged. After all, that's what Wozniak set out to do when he co-founded Apple :P
Besides, there's more wasted bandwidth from dubious user generated content per second floating around the internet at any second.
If you have 100 million requests per day, then you definitely have bigger problems such as your monthly CDN bill. :)
pinterest.com seems to download ~700kB. Adding amusing http headers seems negligible.
*I'm not trying to be pedantic, genuinely curious if it is a word I do not know.
Edit: on second thoughts, it's the IETF, they always move quick. And it's not as though this was a particularly thorny protocol or anything.
# curl -I http://automattic.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2012 12:53:44 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Last-Modified: Fri, 07 Dec 2012 12:51:57 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=193, must-revalidate
X-nananana: Batcache
Vary: Cookie
X-hacker: If you're reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.
X-Pingback: http://automattic.com/xmlrpc.php
Link: <http://wp.me/Pe4R-am2>; rel=shortlink $ curl -I wordpress.org
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2012 12:15:43 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Connection: close
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-nc: HIT luv 139The problem I had was that I couldn't scroll. I ended up having to maximize my browser (Opera) to read them as every time I move my mouse to the scroll bar, they'd shrink again (same problem with using the mouse scroll wheel).
I can't image trying to read those boxes on a tablet where I don't even have a cursor to hover.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Server: '; DROP TABLE servertypes; --
Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2012 10:30:26 GMT
Connection: keep-alive # robots.txt for http://www.palm.com/ modified 7/28/09
User-agent: Vampires
Disallow: /neck User-Agent: bender
Disallow: /my_shiny_metal_ass
User-Agent: Gort
Disallow: /earth Disallow: /harming/humans
Disallow: /ignoring/human/orders
Disallow: /harm/to/self X-Recruiting: If you're reading this, maybe you should be working at SEOmoz instead. Check out www.seomoz.org/about/jobs % curl -I www.zappos.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.1.17
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
X-ZFC-Metadata: KiMIExILCgNuaWQSBDU5NjQSEgoGbGF5b3V0Eghob21lcGFnZQ==
X-Powered-By: Ponies!
X-Varnish-TTL: 60m
X-Varnish: 251047185 251045936
X-Cache-Hits: 87
X-Varnish-Host: varnish04.zappos.net
X-Varnish-ID: drupal
X-Core-Value: 1. Deliver WOW Through Service
X-Recruiting: If you're reading this, maybe you should be working at Zappos instead. Check out jobs.zappos.com
X-UUID: ecbb72d2-40c0-11e2-b1b3-0010184bda34
Cache-Control: max-age=2004
Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2012 23:19:43 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
The cool thing is that the approach to find these unusual headers was pretty systematic.
https://github.com/brightmarch/BrightmarchRestfulBundle/blob...
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf8
Connection: keep-alive
Server: You got SERVED!
X-Cache: MISScurl -I webmaster.appstate.edu
X-Robot-3: Which of the following would you most prefer? A: a puppy, B: a pretty flower from your sweetie, or C: a large properly formatted data file? X-Powered-By: a lot of coffee and Phish HTTP/1.1 200 OK
x-powered-by: blood, sweat, and tears. > X-mas: Almost there.