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. |
Navigation
Collapsniks
Albert Bates (US)
Andrew Nikiforuk (CA)
Brutus (US)
Carolyn Baker (US)*
Catherine Ingram (US)
Chris Hedges (US)
Dahr Jamail (US)
Dean Spillane-Walker (US)*
Derrick Jensen (US)
Dougald & Paul (IE/SE)*
Erik Michaels (US)
Gail Tverberg (US)
Guy McPherson (US)
Honest Sorcerer
Janaia & Robin (US)*
Jem Bendell (UK)
Mari Werner
Michael Dowd (US)*
Nate Hagens (US)
Paul Heft (US)*
Post Carbon Inst. (US)
Resilience (US)
Richard Heinberg (US)
Robert Jensen (US)
Roy Scranton (US)
Sam Mitchell (US)
Tim Morgan (UK)
Tim Watkins (UK)
Umair Haque (UK)
William Rees (CA)
XrayMike (AU)
Radical Non-Duality
Tony Parsons
Jim Newman
Tim Cliss
Andreas Müller
Kenneth Madden
Emerson Lim
Nancy Neithercut
Rosemarijn Roes
Frank McCaughey
Clare Cherikoff
Ere Parek, Izzy Cloke, Zabi AmaniEssential Reading
Archive by Category
My Bio, Contact Info, Signature Posts
About the Author (2023)
My Circles
E-mail me
--- My Best 200 Posts, 2003-22 by category, from newest to oldest ---
Collapse Watch:
Hope — On the Balance of Probabilities
The Caste War for the Dregs
Recuperation, Accommodation, Resilience
How Do We Teach the Critical Skills
Collapse Not Apocalypse
Effective Activism
'Making Sense of the World' Reading List
Notes From the Rising Dark
What is Exponential Decay
Collapse: Slowly Then Suddenly
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Making Sense of Who We Are
What Would Net-Zero Emissions Look Like?
Post Collapse with Michael Dowd (video)
Why Economic Collapse Will Precede Climate Collapse
Being Adaptable: A Reminder List
A Culture of Fear
What Will It Take?
A Future Without Us
Dean Walker Interview (video)
The Mushroom at the End of the World
What Would It Take To Live Sustainably?
The New Political Map (Poster)
Beyond Belief
Complexity and Collapse
Requiem for a Species
Civilization Disease
What a Desolated Earth Looks Like
If We Had a Better Story...
Giving Up on Environmentalism
The Hard Part is Finding People Who Care
Going Vegan
The Dark & Gathering Sameness of the World
The End of Philosophy
A Short History of Progress
The Boiling Frog
Our Culture / Ourselves:
A CoVid-19 Recap
What It Means to be Human
A Culture Built on Wrong Models
Understanding Conservatives
Our Unique Capacity for Hatred
Not Meant to Govern Each Other
The Humanist Trap
Credulous
Amazing What People Get Used To
My Reluctant Misanthropy
The Dawn of Everything
Species Shame
Why Misinformation Doesn't Work
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
The Right to Die
CoVid-19: Go for Zero
Pollard's Laws
On Caste
The Process of Self-Organization
The Tragic Spread of Misinformation
A Better Way to Work
The Needs of the Moment
Ask Yourself This
What to Believe Now?
Rogue Primate
Conversation & Silence
The Language of Our Eyes
True Story
May I Ask a Question?
Cultural Acedia: When We Can No Longer Care
Useless Advice
Several Short Sentences About Learning
Why I Don't Want to Hear Your Story
A Harvest of Myths
The Qualities of a Great Story
The Trouble With Stories
A Model of Identity & Community
Not Ready to Do What's Needed
A Culture of Dependence
So What's Next
Ten Things to Do When You're Feeling Hopeless
No Use to the World Broken
Living in Another World
Does Language Restrict What We Can Think?
The Value of Conversation Manifesto Nobody Knows Anything
If I Only Had 37 Days
The Only Life We Know
A Long Way Down
No Noble Savages
Figments of Reality
Too Far Ahead
Learning From Nature
The Rogue Animal
How the World Really Works:
Making Sense of Scents
An Age of Wonder
The Truth About Ukraine
Navigating Complexity
The Supply Chain Problem
The Promise of Dialogue
Too Dumb to Take Care of Ourselves
Extinction Capitalism
Homeless
Republicans Slide Into Fascism
All the Things I Was Wrong About
Several Short Sentences About Sharks
How Change Happens
What's the Best Possible Outcome?
The Perpetual Growth Machine
We Make Zero
How Long We've Been Around (graphic)
If You Wanted to Sabotage the Elections
Collective Intelligence & Complexity
Ten Things I Wish I'd Learned Earlier
The Problem With Systems
Against Hope (Video)
The Admission of Necessary Ignorance
Several Short Sentences About Jellyfish
Loren Eiseley, in Verse
A Synopsis of 'Finding the Sweet Spot'
Learning from Indigenous Cultures
The Gift Economy
The Job of the Media
The Wal-Mart Dilemma
The Illusion of the Separate Self, and Free Will:
No Free Will, No Freedom
The Other Side of 'No Me'
This Body Takes Me For a Walk
The Only One Who Really Knew Me
No Free Will — Fightin' Words
The Paradox of the Self
A Radical Non-Duality FAQ
What We Think We Know
Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark
Healing From Ourselves
The Entanglement Hypothesis
Nothing Needs to Happen
Nothing to Say About This
What I Wanted to Believe
A Continuous Reassemblage of Meaning
No Choice But to Misbehave
What's Apparently Happening
A Different Kind of Animal
Happy Now?
This Creature
Did Early Humans Have Selves?
Nothing On Offer Here
Even Simpler and More Hopeless Than That
Glimpses
How Our Bodies Sense the World
Fragments
What Happens in Vagus
We Have No Choice
Never Comfortable in the Skin of Self
Letting Go of the Story of Me
All There Is, Is This
A Theory of No Mind
Creative Works:
Mindful Wanderings (Reflections) (Archive)
A Prayer to No One
Frogs' Hollow (Short Story)
We Do What We Do (Poem)
Negative Assertions (Poem)
Reminder (Short Story)
A Canadian Sorry (Satire)
Under No Illusions (Short Story)
The Ever-Stranger (Poem)
The Fortune Teller (Short Story)
Non-Duality Dude (Play)
Your Self: An Owner's Manual (Satire)
All the Things I Thought I Knew (Short Story)
On the Shoulders of Giants (Short Story)
Improv (Poem)
Calling the Cage Freedom (Short Story)
Rune (Poem)
Only This (Poem)
The Other Extinction (Short Story)
Invisible (Poem)
Disruption (Short Story)
A Thought-Less Experiment (Poem)
Speaking Grosbeak (Short Story)
The Only Way There (Short Story)
The Wild Man (Short Story)
Flywheel (Short Story)
The Opposite of Presence (Satire)
How to Make Love Last (Poem)
The Horses' Bodies (Poem)
Enough (Lament)
Distracted (Short Story)
Worse, Still (Poem)
Conjurer (Satire)
A Conversation (Short Story)
Farewell to Albion (Poem)
My Other Sites
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?
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.
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.
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).
Fingers crossed – I hope the table changes work out – Arve’s idea sounds good too. (Love the parrots)
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.
Loads much faster now. I like the pared down look, too. Good job!
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.
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!
Loads so much faster Dave
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.
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.