Widgets | The Habitation of Justice

Tweaking Under The Hood

Lincoln Adams | September 8, 2008 @ 6:46 pm

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. :tongue:

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. :blink:

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. :shaking:

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. :shades:

Tags: blog, blog catalog, coding, lag, load time, mybloglog, network, performance, server, service, spam, traffic, tweaking, widgets
Categories: Blog Fog

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Thief Thief!

Lincoln Adams | May 28, 2007 @ 10:36 pm

One of the growing trends I’ve been observing in the blogosphere lately has been the arrival of social networking and Web 2.0 sites that all seem to have one thing in common: they’re all designed to encourage you to store your content on THEIR networks, rather than on your own site. Got photos you want to show the world? Upload them to Flickr. For videos, there’s YouTube. For music, there’s Last.FM, iLike, Garageband and so on. For those who like to write, network or blog, we have MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga, Vox and blah blah blah, ad infinitum. And then of course we have the specialty sites like Twitter and Tumblr and blah blah blah ad infinitum. Good grief. While I admit that all these sites have their uses respectively, it also means you’re investing a whole lotta time and resources on just about everything except your own blog. People may not even come to your site anymore because your content is now available elsewhere, whether on a MySpace server or a YouTube channel or God only knows where else you’ve been going. Web 2.0 then has not only stolen your time and content, it’s taken your traffic too, and with it a chance for monetization. As a result your blog will eventually wither away until it becomes abandoned altogether, its distinctiveness completely assimilated into the Web 2.0 Collective. Resistance is futile.

Ok, I’m exaggerating, (somewhat), but I have noticed a pattern where bloggers no longer seem to attend to their own blogs with the fervor they once had in the past, and these social networking sites have a lot to do with it. Playing on all those networks can definitely suck up a lot of your time, so much that your creative and physical energy is usually completely exhausted by the time you’re ready to come back to your own blogging home. This actually started to happen with me as well when I noticed I was actually posting more often on StumbleUpon than I was here. Bad Lincoln!! Bad!!!!!

Somehow a balance needs to be struck between utilizing these networks while also maintaining the growth of your own blog, and I think the answer lies in part by observing Facebook’s recent move to allow third party companies onto their platform. For them it’s all about pulling the features and services these companies have into their own network, providing a central location for the very best these third party services have to offer.

In a way I hope that’s what I’m accomplishing here. While I belong to a variety of networks from StumbleUpon to Last.FM (and beyond), using widgets and other plugin technologies has enabled me to pull everything here in one place, rather than watch it all being pushed out there. Even my Flickr Album can be completely viewed natively without any requisite need to go to Flickr. That I think is the key. Follow the Facebook model, and use networks and services to help to promote YOUR blog, not the other way around. Resist the Borg! Fight the power! Viva La Blog Revolucion! :shades:

Tags: album, assimilation, blog, bloggers, blogging, blogosphere, blogs, content, facebook, fervor, flickr, garageband, God, good grief, monetization, monetizing, network, Photos, platform, plugins, resources, social networking, social networking sites, social networks, stealing, stumbleupon, third party, time, traffic, trends, tumblr, twitter, Vox, web 2.0, whole lotta, widgets, YouTube
Categories: Blog Fog

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I Haved Scaled The Highest Mountains…

Lincoln Adams | May 17, 2007 @ 12:33 am

…run through the fields, and scaled every corner of the Internet.

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…

I have abandoned my desktop news aggregator for Google Reader, searched for every module I could find to add to my brand new Netvibes Start Page, and surfed for every known newsfeed in the universe that I could add to my personal collection.

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…

Discovered new blogs, made new friends through Twitter, and joined new communities at MyBlogLog.

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…

Search queried Technorati for “Single Christian Women,” played around with iGoogle till the sun rose again, and checked out all kinds of new widgets that I could add to my blog.

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…

Tags: blog, blogging, blogs, feeds, google, google reader, iGoogle, internet, modules, mybloglog, netvibes, new friends, news aggregation, newsfeed, newsfeeds, rss, Sun, syndication, technorati, twitter, u2, universe, weblogs, widgetbox, widgets
Categories: Blog Fog

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