July 28, 2003

Blogging in its true perspective

Cyber Atlas has come up with some statistics on the effects of blogging on the online community. Attributing theundergrounddialectic for the find, Lynn S [Reflections in D minor] has digested and regurgitated such statistics in a form that is more enlightening and enjoyable to read than the original story. One of the observations she made of which I believe most are unaware:

60 percent of bloggers and 54 percent of blog readers have dial-up Internet access.

Hello! All you bloggers out there with fancy headers and lots of other stuff that make your pages take forever to load - did you get that? More than half of us are still using dial-up! So here's a great way to increase your traffic: SIMPLIFY.
As one of those who is still connected by dialup, and a poor service provider and sorry ass phone company to boot, I can testify to the fact that what she says is important to some of us.

Posted by Tiger at July 28, 2003 09:19 AM
Comments

Dialup: if your browser has an option ``load images automatically'' turn it off. Reading things is a thousand times faster. (Mine is an old Netscape: Edit/Preferences/Advanced(body)/)

It also works on everything else. If you want to see an image, right click on it and select view image. I almost never do that.

Posted by: Ron Hardin at July 28, 2003 11:21 AM

That is a great hint. However, I do not mind graphics, just dislike too many or ones that people did not take the time to compress so that they can load faster for us with pathetic third world connections. ;)

Posted by: Tiger at July 28, 2003 01:17 PM

Sometimes, it's not the graphics that slow down loading time, it's the scripts.

Posted by: Perfectly Sassy at July 28, 2003 03:50 PM

I know just barely enough HTML to even have a website and I know absolutely nothing about scripts BUT I've noticed that on some websites the text loads before the graphics (and on a few they even stay in the same place while the graphics are loading) However they do that I wish everyone else would learn it too. Sekmori designed sites take an especially long time to load.

Posted by: Lynn S at July 28, 2003 04:21 PM

It's really hard for me to tell how long my page takes to load because I also use Dial Up although my ISP provides an accelerator.

No one has said anything yet so I shall remain clueless.

Posted by: serenity at July 28, 2003 06:07 PM

Serenity, Less than a minute. Not bad at all compared to some. I can only connect at 28.8 at least partly because I live waaay out in the woods far away from the phone company.

I do notice one other problem with your site though, not related to speed. The right-hand column overlaps the center column. To read it I click on the permalink to see the individual page.

Posted by: Lynn S at July 28, 2003 09:48 PM

Ah, thanks for the speed update Lynn.

You must be using Netscape or an older version of IE? The overlapping thing occurs on those two browsers.

It works the best with IE6 and above.

Posted by: serenity at July 28, 2003 10:11 PM

Actually, the few times that I have actually watched your site load, Serenity, it does take a while for your Flash banner to load, and I did wonder why you did that in Flash, as something as simple could be done as easily in a .jpg form. However, that is just my observation. As for any trouble with the columns, I have not seen such. The reason I said I have only watched your site load only a few times is not a comment on how often I have visited. As my connection is very slow, I sometimes hit 10 to 15 different links on my blogroll at a time and allow all the pages to load up while I am reading one. Sometimes I have to flip though several before I find one loaded enough to read, and I notice yours in usually not one of them. Usually it is some MT template with no graphical header of any kind. The one that seems to load the slowest that I have noticed is blogoSFERICS. The animated flags load up really fast but I seem to wait and wait for the rest of the site to load. [ Previously published statement about Oraculations deleted because I must have mistaken Howard's blog for some other blog. Howard does not have a title graphic.] Not meaning to step on anyone's toes here, as you are all on my blogroll for the content, not the display!

Posted by: Tiger at July 28, 2003 10:15 PM

How's my display, Tiger?

Posted by: Susie at July 29, 2003 01:04 AM

I took your advice, Tiger. Come and see.

Posted by: Perfectly Sassy at July 29, 2003 12:40 PM

Susie, your display was better with the pink, but I still like it. And Sassy, as I told you on your blog, I like the way you redecorated the house on the hill!

Posted by: Tiger at July 29, 2003 09:30 PM