Cleaning House - Step One
I’ve cut out most of the widgets on this blog. There may be a few more to go, but I’ve tried to limit to the ones people mentioned as worthy of keeping.
But the page is still slow as hell. So the next step is to cut out most of the javascript I have on the page. I’ll work on that next.
And after that I think I’ll need to to a page redesign to complete the cleaning house process.
Comments (Archived):
Or… dump all the heavy work that goes into this thing and make the full-fledged conversion over to Tumblr. What can this blog do that Tumblr can’t with a little code?
Grab the google seo that this blog has
The problem with a lot of the JavaScript here isn’t JavaScript per se, but that it runs as the page is loading, instead of deferring until the page has finished loading.You‘ve got multiple stats tracking tools (mybloglog, google analytics, sitemeter, quantcast). Each done with javascript.While you’re tooling around, update the Google Analytics to use the new code.
Thanks for the suggestionI wish their was a data coop for analytics where I’d put one analytics tag on my page and them permission all of the services that I use to get the dataFred
Loading the site while watching the HTTP headers go by shows that a lot of the items are either set to be non-cacheable, or have very short expiration times…which is just stupid, it makes the client, the server, and the network work harder all in the fear of losing a little bit of data.Another observation: there seem to be a number of objects served by third parties which send more data in the HTTP headers than in the object itself, like the FM adserver which sends back a 1009 byte header for a 43 byte GIF image.I don’t know how much optimization you can really do when the sites which really need tuning are outside your control, other than to drop them.
Having spent way too much time on page load hell, I’d bet that your hidden analytics stuff is what is slowing you down. At the minimum, make sure they are at the very end of the page load so all your content shows up first.I’ve found that performance tuning when you’ve got some widgets isn’t just a function of getting rid of the widgets. It’s also a function of moving around the load locations for the “poor performing” ones (where “poor” doesn’t necessarily mean slow, but also high overhead.)Of course, my blog is still a slow loader so what do I know.
i miss hype faves
you do have a very heavy, sluggish page…
It already made a huge difference whatever it is you did.
I like to use ecosafe printing to email the posts, but it looks like you’ve removed it?
Nice improvements already. This site analysis tool might help identify the bottlenecks and speed up the page load even more…http://www.websiteoptimizat…
fred – you can also test out your blog with Gomez – http://www.gomez.com/info_c…It’ll give you a lot of additional information on page load times of the individual elements on your blog.
Fred -Create a secondary widgets page that contains all of the widgets you want around your social graph.Let the lead (blog) page be ‘cleaner’ & then link out to your widget page.C
Thank you. I’m not sure what to do with my windfall in time. Probably leave even more snarky comments.
I can’t claim to know Fred well, but I’ve spent enough time around him to suspect that this blog comes pretty close to offering exactly the public image that he wants to offer: it is just *him,* not mediated by anyone else nor shaped by concerns about how he “should” appear.
I am thinking about it. I’ve learned so much in the almost five years I’ve been doing this though. I hate to turn this over to a pro and stop learning new tricks
Totally agree with whitneymcn…And I don’t care much about slow loading anyway… because (1) I normally would load multiple screens and read them whenever they’re loaded, and (2) I access the net 100% from home (not from mobile devices) – my team is geographically dispersed and I don’t go to conferences… 🙂
I’m not sure they are mutually exclusive — you’ll never stop playing around with the new stuff, you may just have an extra step in terms of getting new stuff on your site. Not sure that’s necessarily a bad thing.Too much geeking can have its downsides too though. I’ll likely be hard pressed to ever switch off of WordPress software — and not just because Michael Sippey never returned my call when I called him last July to ask about MT. But because I have taken the time to understand somewhat how WordPress’ “The Loop” works, and switching to something where I’d have to relearn all that is a huge barrier. Sometimes what you learn can hold you back!