Slow pageloads are evil. Sometimes a poor hosting service or plan is the problem but often there are little things that can destroy your pageload times that you brought upon yourself.
I am not a power web programmer by any stretch of the imagination so this tip would definitely fit under the easy to implement category. If you notice your pages crawling along, take a look at your sidebars, especially if you have a sidebar on the left side.
Check all of your widgets and 3rd party managed blogrolls that you have piled into the sidebars. Each time your page loads, in addition to hitting your own database, it has to connect to each of those 3rd party services and pull data from them. Some services are better than others. Find the ones that are slowing you down. The Firebug plugin for Firefox is a great way to find out how long each element on your page takes to load. Load your page and then look at the Net tab of Firebug.
If your slow elements are loading before the main content, the reader will notice the page loading slowly. One simple fix that usually seems to work is to move those slow elements to the right sidebar (preferably toward the bottom) which is normally loaded after the main content. The page will take the same amount of time to load but the content will get served to the reader much faster and they will hit the back button much less often.
If you are comfortable with CSS, you can use CSS to load your main content column and then the left and right sidebars and keep your favorite slow widgets in the left sidebar, but that’s a little trickier.
Also, when you notice a slow widget or 3rd party service, take a close look at how much benefit you and your reader get out of the widget or badge. Completely removing as many of these slow elements is an even better fix for slow pageloads.
Google changed the AdSense ads by making less of the AdSense ad area clickable to prevent accidental clicks. Fair enough. In theory if the CTR drops because their are less accidental clicks, then the amount paid per click should go up because the clicks that do happen are more purposeful. Or something like that.
Anyway, some people seem to have seen their CTR drop through the floor. Others haven’t been affected that badly by the change to the AdSense ads. It hasn’t seemed to change my CTR one way or the other on any of my blogs.
After noticing something earlier today, I went on a hunt for people running sidebar ads and was actually surprised by how many blogs that I know used to run AdSense that don’t anymore. But, eventually, I found a post on mommy bytes that had the ads in the right sidebar. The clickable area was indeed the new smaller area. Here is a poor image to show it, but feel free to click over to Angela’s site to check for yourself.
Then I went did a Google search for “cats” and came up with this:
Cool. Fewer accidental clicks all around.
But wait. I said I noticed something that made me start this investigation in the first place. I was in my Gmail account reading a newsletter email from Yaro Starak and had my house hovering over one of the ads that Gmail shows and noticed it has a different clickable area:
So wait a second. Google still gets to use the big clickable email on ads that they display on Gmail. And then they put those ads right next to the scrollbar where people have to click to read the rest of their emails. That can’t possibly be a recipe for accidental clicks.
But I’m sure Google has something in place to determine which of those clicks were accidental and return that money to the advertisers.
I accidentally noticed a neat feature in Gmail the other day.
If you hover over the sender of an email, you get a little pop-up. For example, hovering over the Netflix Receiving sender give me this pop-up.
Then if you select More -> Recent Conversations:
It will show all of the emails that you have sent to or received from that person/company.
Pretty cool. As you can see from the screenshot, it is simply prefilling in a search query with the email address you were hovering over as both the sender and receiver. I’m not really sure if this is a new feature or just a new for me because I never noticed it feature. Either way, I’ll be using it pretty frequently.
Oct 19
2007
webbythoughts
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There are a few things that I have been looking for on ebay recently. I’m planning on buying a new bigger fish tank and I’m softly thinking about buying a Nokia N800 someday.
I don’t really like hanging around ebay and searching all the time, though. I noticed after typing in a few searches that the little RSS thing showed up at the end of the URL bar in Firefox.
So, I subscribed to a few of the searches and have been happily receiving updates in my feed reader. So far, I still haven’t found the tank that I want and I still haven’t pulled the trigger on the Nokia N800 but at least if something does show up on ebay, I’ll be in a better position to notice it. I’m in my feed reader several times a day and only in ebay once in a great while.
You should be able to copy and paste the URL after doing any search and use that in your feed reader to subscribe to that search. If you ever try to subscribe to a search and have trouble with it, let me know and I’ll give you a hand.
I don’t log into MyBlogLog much anymore so I’m a little bit behind on noticing that Yahoo! took over MyBlogLog recently. I had to log in with my Yahoo! id and then agree to link the two accounts.
Annoying. But then I was surprised to notice that somewhere during the crossover, they ate my profile image and information. I’m not sure how that is possible but figure that they must have access to that information from before the merger. I’m hoping that I clicked something wrong which caused the problem.
But in the end, I don’t really care because I don’t think I’ll be keeping MyBlogLog around on any of my blogs all that much longer. I hardly ever go into their website anymore and I never get any traffic from them. If I’m not using them either inbound or outbound, then they are pretty useless to me.
I’m hoping to whip up a new theme once our baby is born and things calm down in a couple months. At that point, I’ll probably be getting rid of both MyBlogLog and BlogRush on all of the new themes.
Did you know that you can watch a bunch of NBCs programs on your computer? I used it after watching the first season of Heroes on DVD a couple weeks ago to watch the first couple episodes of season 2 so I could start watching the shows live.
There are a ton of things that I love about watching the shows on their website instead of TV or waiting for the DVD.
Better picture quality. We have old school analog cable. The picture seems to get worse by the week. Maybe I need a new cable cord. The picture in the browser is crystal clear.
Fewer commercials. An episode of 30 Rock has 3 commercial breaks. Each commercial break has exactly one commercial. Sweet. I can sit through commercial breaks that short without even really noticing them.
Works on Firefox. Without any warning or complaints or hiccups. Good job NBC.
Can watch whenever I want during the week. I’m not sure how long shows stick around but at least a few weeks. So instead of trying to decide whether to rush the kids bedtime so I can watch the beginning of Heroes, I can put them to bed and then watch the episode anytime during the week. And I don’t even need to remember to record it.
Free. Unlike the DVDs.
One thing that is not really a complaint but kind of bizarre is that each show is sponsored by someone. Lipitor in the case of the episode of 30 Rock that I watched the other day. Each and every one of the commercials was the exact same commercial. It seems like advertisers would do better to have a different ad for each break. A little variety to keep people from glossing over. 3 Lipitor commercials instead of just 1 that we ignore at least 2 times.
Are you thinking about upgrading to WordPress 2.3? Make sure you stop by the WordPress Plugin Compatibility for 2.3 page. They have a list of plugins that are okay and plugins that will cause problems with WordPress 2.3.
I scanned the list and the only one that I noticed is the Popularity Contest 1.2.1 plugin. I checked to see if there was a newer version but the most recent one that I see is 1.2.1. I’ve been thinking about removing this plugin anyway and hand picking the posts that I want to highlight.
We expecting a baby in a couple weeks, so I might hold off on the upgrade until things start to settle down. Let me know if you upgrade and whether you have any issues or not.
Technorati Tags: WordPress, blogging, internet
I really need to find something to talk about other than BlogRush, but I received an email from them the other day.
No, BlogRush isn’t really giving away free Viagra. They were just MAKING SURE WE KNEW about some of their shocking new changes coming soon to a BlogRush near you.
They also posted the letter on their blog adding this great line at the top:
Many ISPs have email delivery issues and not all emails go through so I wanted to make sure everyone will read it, if possible..
Cool. But, I am guessing that the ISPs are not having delivery issues. I’m guessing the email ended up in the spam folder of a lot of email accounts.
Check out how the letter opens:
TO: All BlogRush Members
FROM: John Reese, Founder of BlogRush
ARE YOU READY? Because *everything* is about to change. Forget everything else up until now…
Wow. Everything? Is 2+2 still 4? Are reports still not available at BlogRush?
Anyway, there go read the whole email. I can’t talk about how excited or not all of the big revelations made me because I tuned out after about the THIRD STRANGE CAPITILIZED CATCHPHRASE!!!
Anyway, I did find something in the BlogRush FAQ the other day that answered my question about how you can cancel your BlogRush account:
Although we hate to see you go, if you wish to cancel your account, simply send an email to support@blogrush.com
with “Cancel My Account” in the subject line, and we’ll remove your
account from our database. We may choose to allow users to manually
cancel their accounts in the near future.
Not exactly easy, but they do have clear instructions at least.
Technorati Tags: BlogRush, internet, blogging
I ended up removing the BlogRush widget from all of my blogs except for this one. I’ll probably keep it here for a while as a way of keeping track of how it is working.
After removing the widget code from each of the blogs, I logged into BlogRush to delete out the other blogs but quickly realized that there is no where to do that. There is all kinds of information about adding blogs and installing the widget but nothing about how to get individual blogs our of the program when you want to remove the widget.
I also noticed that I have a negative credit balance. I’m not really sure how that happened but maybe it has something to do with removing the widget code and not being able to notify BlogRush that I was pulling those blogs from the program for a while.
Anyway, they also announced that they are going to be adding the ability to customize the color of the widget a little bit to make them fit into different blogs better. It sounds like you basically get to pick between red, blue, yellow, etc. but don’t really have the option of saying you want it to be #CC0000 or something that would let people match it exactly to their theme. We’ll see when it is officially available.
Technorati Tags: BlogRush, internet, blogging
Due to the annoying popularity of the big BlogRush release, I added BlogRush to a few of my blogs. I decided to spend a few minutes clicking through to stories and find a few new blogs through the widget. After a couple pageloads, BlogRush experienced some technical difficulties resulting in the widget not be able to load.
And this is the error message that showed up in my sidebar:
Now, I’m not writing this to pick on BlogRush for their system getting overwhelmed. Almost all brand new web services that get extremely popular right off the bat are going to have some system down time. Twitter drove us all crazy with how frequently we had to look at those cats tweaking the servers.What I don’t like is the message itself. We are not experiencing technical difficulties. BlogRush is. And my site is online right now, don’t post messages on my blog saying that the site is down and to try again later.
Any body making widgets that people are supposed to use on blogs should take special care that when there is a problem displaying the widget, that the error routine clearly identifies the widget writer in the error message or maybe a simple banner for the widget site or simply displays white space.
Technorati Tags: BlogRush, blogging, internet