Thursday, January 26, 2006

The people have spoken ...

... Kn@ppster was getting hard to read. It took too long to load. No, really. And, as I've mentioned, Technorati didn't seem to want to index it.

So, I've made some changes:

- I dumped the Amazon script that pops up previews of the books I link to. Cool idea, but it's in beta and I've noticed my browser waiting on it to load myself.

- I got rid of the Google search box. You guys know where Google is, and you know how to use it to search for my stuff if you're interested in doing so.

- I got rid of the Babelfish translator box. Any of my readers who don't speak English either know about Babelfish or, uh, wouldn't be able to read the damn thing anyway.

- I yanked some graphics. Most of those, I replaced with links in the blogrolls. If that's good enough, cool. If it's not ... well, I'm not saying that those sites need me more than I need them, but I definitely do need my readers more than I need a bunch of little buttons clogging things up.

- I thought I might have found a metadata problem that could explain the cold shoulder from Technorati. I fixed it. The fix doesn't seem to have adversely affected the blog's appearance, but it also doesn't seem to have changed anything vis a vis Technorati. Suggestions appreciated (if Mike L. isn't just correct in his statement that Technorati is just plain lagging on some sites, probably the larger/higher-ranked ones with more links to index).

- I got rid of my "flavicon." It wasn't anything special and it may have added a few milliseconds to load time. If you don't know what a flavicon is and can't tell what's missing when you load the site, well, it didn't really matter, did it?

Some stuff I kept: The javascript that makes my blogrolls manageable; the Haloscan script (I just like it better than Blogger's commenting system, and it's useful for trackback stuff, too). Overall, the site seems to load faster from my end ... but I'm interested in whether or not others see improved performance. Let me know. Kn@ppster can only be as readable as it is useable.

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