Chipping the web – when I started

No… thank-you, Chip! You’ve provided some great traffic, commentary, and been a great reader of my blog and I really appreciate it.

Thanks Again,
Doug

Off Topic.

Why is your blog so big and slow, Sterling? It seems to be about 300kB (rather than -say- 30 kB) although it is mostly text and the pics youhave are small? What’s causing all the overhead?

Just FYI.

Stu

Stu: It probably has something to do with the ads. Specifically, I seem to recall that Amazon ads tend to be presented via iframes.

As apotheon said, Amazon ads use an iframe loaded from an Amazon server. I might try taking that down to see if it makes a difference. There is also a fair amount of javascript being executed to serve the Google ads and log page views and such. I’ll have to give it some more analysis. Thanks for the heads up, Stu.

Ha. I had been playing around with Grazr in the sidebar and accidentally left a widget open. That probably had a fairly large overhead.

I also removed the Amazon ads. I have yet to make any money off those anyway.

How’s it look now, Stu?

Still about 350 kByte, not appreciably faster

For comparison, mine is 55kB at halfway thru the month (I archive monthly so it doesn’t get too big). My blog for March 2005 was the biggest at 99 kB. No ads, no bucket-lists (since almost no-one was using them anyway). But hand coded

Stu, there you have one advantage of hand-coding everything yourself. You know exactly what’s being exchanged.

What tool are you using to measure the bandwidth consumed?

Thanks again

I browse with Opera. It shows me the size of stuff in transit and the number of objects.

And it’s safer than IEx for any and all values of x

Oh and I have a THREE sided single
In the late 60s Private Eye cut a record with two tracks on one side, two starting points 180 degrees apart, so it was a random choice what you got to hear.

MOST confusing

It’s also possible that some JavaScript stuff might be inflating page size by causing things to be downloaded that are not displayed when you view source — and since Google AdSense uses Javascript, once again advertising might be a major culprit.

I’d check out what Firefox reports about page size at SOB (my own weblog, using the same WordPress software Sterling uses) as a point of comparison, but it reports “Unknown” as the page size on the main page so I’m afraid that’s not working so well. On the other hand, opening a single article on mine reports page sizes around 15KB, while this page at Chip’s Quips reports nearly 250KB, so clearly there’s a difference, and it’s not (just) Google AdSense.

Then again, I don’t have nearly the massive sidebar Sterling uses, so maybe advertising isn’t such a major culprit after all.

I had forgotten about that feature of Opera. I generally use Firefox 2.0, but I’ll make use of Opera for that purpose in the future. Thanks for the tip!

That’s a bizarre but ingenious idea for a 45.

[...] When I started this blog, I was 46 years old. [...]