Got bored last weekend, so I’ve been making some tweaks here and there to improve the speed and performance of my site.  The biggest change was dropping the ad server that’s been serving my ads, and hard coding it into my blog instead.  No matter what, I could never get it to execute fast enough, which I’m guessing is partly a limitation of using a shared hosting account.  If I ever go dedicated though, I’ll probably give it another shot, but that might be a while (a dedicated account would cost me almost $200 a month!)

If you’re wondering what the flip I’m talking about, using an ad server basically allows me carte blanche control over how ads are served, so if someone outside my current ad networks wanted to book an ad, I could easily set up an account for them and then temporarily disable the ads that were already running.  Unfortunately now I won’t be able to do this, but I don’t think it will be an issue until I get far more traffic to my site, at which point I should have enough of a budget to get an ad server running again.

And what’s a dedicated account you ask?  Well right now I’m using a shared account at $10 a month, which means I’m sharing a server with a bazillion other users, and thus am only alloted a fraction of the server’s power.  If I get a dedicated account however, I’ll have a server all to myself to do as I please, which means a LOT more computing power and significantly better performance for my site as well.  It may be another year though before I can afford such a solution, if ever.  If you want to help me achieve this goal though, spread the word and link to my blog, dangit.  Bunch of stingy freeloaders, y’all. 

Anyhoo, I also darkened the background a little and dropped the MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog widgets.  Seriously, I’m fed up with both services.  It’s like I’m advertising their networks on my blog and in return I’m getting, well, nothing.  It’s nice that my blog is registered in their directories so people can find me, but I could count on one hand how much traffic I’ve gotten from either network as a result.  Not enough to justify the 1-2 second lag they were adding to my blog’s load times.   And besides, both networks are getting bogged down in spam too.  I can’t tell you how many contacts I have now that live in China.  Evidently I’m a pretty popular guy over there. 

But most disappointedly, I was hoping surfing these networks would help me find like-minded hot babes that I could play love snuggles with.  Sad to say though, I find that I am such a unique individual that it is yea nigh impossible to find someone who thinks just like me. 

But anyways, do me a favor and let me know if you’ve noticed any improvement in load times and performance.  I’ve definitely noticed a difference, but I want to make sure others are seeing it as well.