Prison Break and Blogger

Today it is the dogs' turn to provide a little humor to help digest all those scrumptious Thanksgiving meals many of you ate yesterday.  After all, laughter is good exercise. And what could be funnier today than watching a prison break?


If the video doesn't play, click here.

We have mentioned before about having a problem visiting and leaving comments because blogs load slowly - some more so than others.  Many bloggers and visitors lead a hectic life and have a limited amount of time to visit, so the easier it is to load your/our page, the more grateful we/they are. 

There are things we can all do to help Blogger blogs load faster  For one, we can clean up our sidebar. (Yes, we will be cleaning up ours again soon.)  With Blogger, we can have 10 pages on any subject.  We can make a page for the blog links we keep in our sidebar.  (We deleted our links when so many blogs were being locked over a link to a site that had been hacked.  Setting up a page for links is on our to-do list.)  This is a major loading holdup.  But if we make a page for our friends, all those links will only load when the friends page is clicked on.  We can make one for bridge friends or awards - or whatever subject fits our needs.  This helps the blog to load faster since you've cut down on the amount of links that must load on the main page.

The other day we posted on being careful because using some cute decorations found on the internet could get your blog hacked or hijacked.   Today The Real Blogger Status has a post on how adding holiday decorations can impact your visitors.

"Besides the long term and subtle computer hacking, your readers, visiting your blog decorated with the latest animation, will have a more immediate and obvious problem to consider - browser freezes and other computer overload problems." (Read the full post, Holiday Decorations & Your Blog, #2)

We clicked on a few blogs including our own with our homemade background and header and found loading any of them requires 100% of our CPU. Since there is no 101%-plus CPU, it's no wonder some blogs take FOREVER to load and let us scroll.

This post helped us understand why loading a blog uses 100% of our CPU ---

"The new templates feature the blog content housed in a transparent layer, so you can see the background beneath the content. As you scroll through the blog content, the background is displayed, in its glory. Your computer has to redraw the background, and the blog content, constantly, as you scroll. That takes computing power."  (Read the full post The New Designer Templates Have A Downside)

If you have music that loads too, we are less inclined to return.  You see, when it's quiet in here and music suddenly blasts, Jan screams and we all become very nervous.  The only place our speakers can sit is way behind our monitor so one of us has to get up and go alter the volume, then get up again when leaving the blog.  That isn't going to happen!  If we want to leave a comment, we get blasted out each time we click and the page changes. It makes us so nervous, we just want to get off that blog.   It can chase away other visitors too.

"Unexpected music can create both a bandwidth annoyance, and an audible distraction. People surfing blogs in a shared environment, for instance a library, won't appreciate any audio content in any blog.  

"If you want to decorate your blog with your favourite playlist, to complement the mood of the blog, that's OK - as long as you make the music optional." (Read the full article, Including Music in Your Blog.)

We're posting this for our own information too.  We want our visitors to have a pleasant experience and hope you would tell us if you have a problem on our site.