DAVE’S BLOG CLEANUP PART ONE

Posted on February 8, 2004 by Dave Pollard
Well, thanks to readers much more tech-savvy than I am, I think I may be able to get Google to start picking up my posts again, and, by tightening up the code of my blogroll, also make the page load faster for those patient readers with dial-up access. So far I have moved the blogroll to the right hand column, so Google will not get bogged down in the blogroll code and give up before it gets to the actual posts. In the process I messed up the masthead, so I’ve adopted a simple one-piece masthead temporarily.

If this post works properly, I’ll then make an additional change to my blogroll, stripping out the table HTML and replacing it with a simple list separated by line breaks. Next post will report on the results of that. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

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12 Responses to DAVE’S BLOG CLEANUP PART ONE

  1. Marijo says:
    February 8, 2004 at 21:34

    What I meant was, David Harris just flipped his blog like this, too. I wonder if he’s had the same problems as you, and found the same solution?

  2. Dave Pollard says:
    February 8, 2004 at 21:43

    If he has, I don’t envy him. I only hope that Google looks at the first 101k of each page to spider, because if it skips every page over 101k I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get it under that, since even the stripped down blogroll alone is greater than that.

  3. Arve Bersvendsen says:
    February 9, 2004 at 03:25

    Congratulations, you just made your blog a lot friendlier to the blind people using text-only browsers (like Lynx). Google is blind. :-)As for your right-hand; I’d suggest marking up your blogroll as an unordered list, using [ul] and [li] and use CSS to remove the list bullets.

  4. Sean says:
    February 9, 2004 at 08:21

    I don’t know if that’s still your temporary masthead, but I like it a lot (and think you should adopt it, or something similar, permanently).

  5. Aalia Wayfare says:
    February 9, 2004 at 11:29

    Fingers crossed – I hope the table changes work out – Arve’s idea sounds good too. (Love the parrots)

  6. peter says:
    February 9, 2004 at 11:42

    Not sure if this is just me, but your icon in my Firebird bookmarks is the same as Circadian Shift’s (blue with yellow C, white S).I like the clean white background, btw.

  7. Rayne says:
    February 9, 2004 at 12:55

    Loads much faster now. I like the pared down look, too. Good job!

  8. Aalia Wayfare says:
    February 9, 2004 at 13:03

    Hi Dave, Just downloaded the source and did a comparison,wheras the front page weighed in at 405K of source code its now a mere 118K. Excellent work. It loads a lot faster now.

  9. Dave Pollard says:
    February 9, 2004 at 13:06

    Thanks everyone. By popular request I’ll keep the new ‘temporary’ masthead. Special thanks to Philip, Arve, Seth, Ken and Aalia, and Lawrence Lee at Radio, without whom I’d never have got this far. I’ll be sending you each an e-mail note and a little extra thank-you as soon as I know Google’s back visiting. Wow, what a community!

  10. Rob Paterson says:
    February 10, 2004 at 10:10

    Loads so much faster Dave

  11. Arve Bersvendsen says:
    February 10, 2004 at 18:07

    There is still a lot of optimizing that can be done. For instance; take the sidebar on the main page that (currently) starts with “TABLE OF CONTENTS BY CATEGORY (to Feb.3)”. Instead of letting this sidebar use lots of “tagsoup”, it really is a list with a heading in front.That list is, at the time of reading, six elements long (a minimal part of the entire sidebar), and 1740 bytes. By changing it to look like this (< and > replaced for [] for clarity):[h3]TABLE OF CONTENTS BY CATEGORY (to Feb.3)[/h3][ul class=”navigatorList”][li][a href=”…”]Linktext[/a][/li][li][a href=”…”]Linktext[/a][/li][li][a href=”…”]Linktext[/a][/li][li][a href=”…”]Linktext[/a][/li][li][a href=”…”]Linktext[/a][/li][/ul]the size of that single list is brought down to 973 bytes – a saving of about 45% . CSS would then be applied to style this appropriately. If we project a 45% saving on the markup in the right-hand sidebar alone, the sidebar will shrink from ~63000 bytes to ~35900 bytes. If we drop any notion of “content” and concentrate on “markup”, the we are shortening the markup by a whopping 55%.There is around 100KB of markup on the frontpage of this blog. Given that we can shorten all of it by an equal percentage (from having a brief view – a fair assumption), the size of the markup is reduced from 100KB to 45KB.That would shorten the current front page from 171KB down to 45+77KB (77 is the size of your current index) – which would bring you very near the Google frequent indexing size of 101KB, mentioned in an earlier comment.Considering the length of your writings, dropping the entry count for the index by one or two would bring your index document to under 100KB.

  12. Raging Bee says:
    February 11, 2004 at 08:11

    If you’re open to suggestions, you may want to consider dumping your link to Stand Down. Last I looked, the place was nothing more than a toilet clogged with stale sloganeering, pitiful conspiracy theories, childish petulance and name-calling, and shameless anti-Jewish and anti-American bigotry. As much as I disagree with many of the things you say, your blog stands head, shoulders, trunk and groin above such mindless drivel as consistently fills Stand Down; and linking to it gives it wholly unearned dignity.But hey, it’s your blog. Hope the new format works better for you.

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