Category Archives: Discourse.net

According to the web site optimization page, this blog is too big and loads too slowly:

Connection Rate	Download Time
14.4K	70.21 seconds
28.8K	36.81 seconds
33.6K	32.03 seconds
56K	20.58 seconds
ISDN 128K	8.66 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps	3.86 seconds

For readers on a good cable/DSL connection, this shouldn’t be an issue; but the thought that it might take 20 seconds to load this page on dialup is sobering. I currently have the blog set to show six past days of content. I could set it to fewer in order to speed things up. Should I?

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I was idly checking logs, and noticed that my MT-Blacklist plugin has been a busy little beaver blocking comment spam. Interestingly, although I have about 800 lines of regex's and banned sites, just two lines in the list of blocks seem to be doing the lion's share of the work:

(diet|penis)[\w-_.]*(pills|enlargement)[\w-_.]*.[a-z]{2,}

and (imagine the following is all one line)

(levitra|lolita|phentermine|viagra|vig-?rx|zyban|valtex|
xenical|adipex|meridia\b)[\w-_.]*.[a-z]{2,}

I have no idea whether this just reflects a particularly active spammer or two this week, or whether it's something more meaningful.

Well, I can see two minor and one major issues already:

Minor Issues

1. my feed updates right away; feedburner introduces a lag of unknown size
2. my feed includes the graphics (e.g. the mars item); feedburner, no doubt for bandwidth reasons, doesn't. But it doesn't tell you it's not there either…

Not-so-minor Issue

1. My feed was 100% of the post; feedburner truncates.

Maybe this won't be a very long experiment.

As promised, I've begun redirecting my RSS feeds to the feedburner versions. Please let me know if you experience any difficulties.

While on the subject of blog mechanics (a subject that seems to draw more comments than most…up there with the Lord of the Rings and Knee Defender)…I've just installed a new MT plugin by Gavin Estey called MT-flipflop which is supposed to let me have alternating background colors in the comments. I've gotten rid of the divider lines which I never much liked, and have managed to get one of the colors to change; the other stubbornly stays fixed to the blog's overall background color. Well, it's just version 0.1 of the plugin. Update After running a CSS validator, I fixed four errors in the style sheet. The IE and Firefox versions now look much more alike, and both colors in the comments are now quite distinct.

This, however, raises the question just how lurid the background color(s) should be. Should I restrict my choice to a non-dithering color? It's a very limited set of colors. Or should I widen the choices and pick a bright yellow (#EEEE00)? A bold light blue (#63B8FF)? Something sorta purpleish (#CCCCFF)? Living in Miami makes us willing to explore garish choices…

I make the full text of my blog available via the rdf & xml feeds. This is great for readers like me who like to read all their news in a newsreader and minimize the clicking. But it's bad for writers like me who like to know how much their stuff is being read, as the act of reading RSS doesn't increment any of the blog's counters.

Is there a silent majority, or even significant minority, of RSS-readers out there? In an effort to find out, some time early next week, I think I'm going to attempt to redirect, at least temporarily, the existing rss feeds to the ones provided by feedburner. This will give me some statistics and should be seamless for everyone, but it's possible that some newsreaders will detect the change and be unahppy.

Feedburner is “pre-alpha” software, so I won't do this for long, at least for now. If you are a reader who relies on either the rdf or the xml feed and find that this change causes you any grief in the next few days, drop me a note and I'll discontinue the experiment. (Or, if you think this is a lousy idea, please say so in comments, and I'll reconsider.)