Thursday, September 20, 2007

Feedback Request

(Note: We've done some troubleshooting and made some necessary changes to the blog which I explain in the additional paragraph.)

I just received an email message from a friend who complains that Webster's is extremely slow to load, and he believes it is because the layout is too complicated. Since I've experienced this problem myself with Webster's, as opposed to most other blogs I frequent, I think this friend is probably right. However, I was assuming that it is chiefly because I am on dial-up that I experience this problem.

How does Webster's load for the rest of you? I may need to do something about this if it is a big problem. In fact, I see at sitemeter that many visits to the blog are registered as zero time. I wonder if this loading problem might be a factor in that?

Ok, here's what we've done so far. We've temporarily disabled the Table of Contents feature, while we try to figure out how to make it load differently. I don't know how many of you use this feature, or whether it has been useful to any of you, but it has been a pretty useful feature for me so I'd like to have it back if the bugs can be worked out of it. This seems to have been the main culprit regarding the loading issues. Also, the music has been removed for good. This too was causing a delay in loading, but nowhere near what the ToC was causing. If any of you have any more suggestions, or if you continue to experience difficulties with loading, or whatever, please let me know so I can work on correcting it. Thanks.

3 comments:

John Savage said...

It can be slow for me at times; sometimes it ends up looking like Internet Explorer is not responding, and then eventually it comes up. It's only rarely that I give up and decide to try again later, though.

I don't think you should read too much into the SiteMeter data; anyone who doesn't click onto a second page while visiting generally gets logged as being on the site for zero time. So if I come by and see that there have been no changes since my last visit, I would think it would list me as being there for zero time even though it loaded perfectly fine.

Hope this is useful.

John Savage said...

Terry, I also see you took down the music, which seems to be helping a bit. (Especially if your visitor already has music playing on his computer!)

Michael Tams said...

Terry,

I have an almost brand-new computer and high-speed internet connection and I too have loading problems with your site.

It is simply... too much goodness! My experience is similar to John's, btw.

-MT