June 14, 2003

The Blogosphere is a strange place

I am not sure what this is. I just said it is a rant. I just took a look at The Metal Wings of Destiny and found AstreaEdge's latest post to be a well-written commentary* on the petty feuding that seems to be so common in the Blogosphere and seems to be freely publicized by those blogs which AstreaEdge described as "role models for those of us new to the world of blogging."

I too marvel that so many in the Blogosphere find it worthwhile to make notations of every petty battle that occurs between bloggers. If it is an intellectual debate, fine! Spread the news! But when it involves whining, name calling and irrational activities, why waste the bandwidth? If I want to read about something in which I have no interest, I will wait for the next edition of the Weekly World News.

However, what I found really ironic about AstreaEdge's posting was that when I read it, there was already one comment: from the only blogger with whom I have had a feud, albeit, very small.

*If you are not yet reading this blog, you should be.

publicizing my thoughts: "I wonder if it would be alright to ask AstreaEdge for some pointers on how to jazz up my template?"

Posted by Tiger at June 14, 2003 05:54 PM | TrackBack
Comments

The important thing is to never take Laurence too seriously. Sure, some of what he says may seem offensive, however, as he once told me, his "schtick has been humor, tasteless and cheap". I respect your decision not to lend your support to such humor, however, it is rare to see someone so willing to tackle a branch of humor that has such a high probability of pissing others off, and rarer still when that person has managed to piss of as few as he has.

As for asking me for pointers, ask away. I'll help where I can, but know this: I have very limited knowledge of MT tricks and a lot of what I do with my templates revolves around the strategic use (alright, alright, I'll admit it, I use them everywhere) images, so if you want to please the bandwidth-challenged, my techniques may not be the best way to go.

Posted by: AstreaEdge at June 14, 2003 08:18 PM

I suppose my first question is if all those borders around your posts are graphics or are done in .css?

Posted by: Tiger at June 14, 2003 08:24 PM

Those would be graphical.

Posted by: AstreaEdge at June 14, 2003 10:05 PM

follow this link to see what the current layout looks like without any of the layout graphics.

I can do design without graphics, however, I prefer the style and control that graphics give me.

Posted by: AstreaEdge at June 14, 2003 10:21 PM

Yes, I would love to put more graphics on my site, but as I am the one with bandwidth problems, plus not sure exactly how much space I have on my server, I am very conservative about using graphics. However, your page seems to load pretty fast for me, but it may just be due to most of it be in my cache as I visit quite often.

Posted by: Tiger at June 14, 2003 10:47 PM

Since the layout graphics don't change after I put up a layout they will be retrieved from the browser's cache once the browser checks the server to make sure that they haven't changed. The current V.08 weighs in at 81.9kBytes of layout graphic data.

Posted by: AstreaEdge at June 14, 2003 11:18 PM

That is actually not much. Are you using ,jpgs?

Posted by: Tiger at June 14, 2003 11:58 PM

The images (there are two separate images) of the girl, the flowers and the title are done with JPEGs and weigh in at 65.0kBytes for the both of them.

Everything else (body side border - 812bytes, info column title 3.0kBytes, info column body - 844bytes, info column footer - 2.1kBytes, post title - 4.67kBytes, post body - 859bytes, and post footer - 4.65kBytes) is done via GIF with either 256 or 16 colors depending on the conditions. These weigh in at a total of 16.9kBytes.

Posted by: AstreaEdge at June 15, 2003 12:35 AM