The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

I went through some more testing with the new theme and reduced the posts on the front page to 4 (it was 5 after my recent changes) and also removed some of the Sociable icons that I didn’t feel were that important so that I would see a little bit of speed improvement.

Some of the CSS in the new theme takes a few hundred milliseconds to load but I can live with that.  The site itself (web host) is occasionally jumping up into the 750ms range which is high (it usually is around 125ms) but that comes with being on a shared host and not wanting to pay more money for hosting.

The load times should be down to around 2 seconds total on average, from around 3.2 after my last tweaks, and from over 5 seconds when I started tweaking!   Also that is 2 seconds until the last content is done loading, but the way that Wordpress sites are structured the body content gets loaded pretty quickly, before the sidebar and footer where most of my javascript code is at which means that you will still be able to start reading stuff before the whole page is done loading.

Once I get a new banner in place things should be trucking along good to keeping the site clean and accessible.  The only ads I have right now is the Amazon Associates sidebar.  Eventually the Entrecard widget may come back as Graham hinted at some nice changes in the future to the way Entrecard will work and how “commenting will be the new dropping”.  With the other recent changes and encouraging people to comment to earn ECs, I think it will be more worthwhile to put the widget back on even if I get some site slow-down from it.  It is pretty unobtrusive overall so it won’t mess up the look of the site much.

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