Does this site load slow?

Does it wobble to and fro?

Can you tie it in a knot?

Can you tie it in a bow?  C'mon...sing it with me now!

Okay, so I've had some occasional complaints that ShazzerSpeak takes f o r e v e r to load, and after a little research I concluded that it's probably because of all the third-party widgets that are plugged into the sidebars.

So I took some time to review my "gutter" content the other day and was kind of embarrassed when I realized that a lot of the stuff I have parked there is for MY amusement rather than any benefit to my 11 faithful readers.

Then in the midst of this discovery came word that my kick-ass hosting service was going to start tracking bandwidth usage and in the future, and any blog owner using more than 2 gigabytes per month would be charged extra for it. This is a completely reasonable thing for them to do and my mentioning it is in no way a complaint, but this did give me another reason to trim the fat from my sidebars. (As I understand it, in addition to slowing the site down, third-party widgets also suck up bandwidth.)

And so the purge began.  The counter that shows the flag of the country a visitor comes from is gone, along with the mybloglog widget that track my most popular links. Dubya's Days Left in Office Countdown Clock has also been removed...but that doesn't mean I'm not still ticking them off my calendar. (You'll notice the Impeach Bush button remains...especially since people seem to FINALLY  be getting onboard.)

So, if you're one of the fabled "11 faithful"...or if you just accidently ended up here while looking for photos of Swedish soccer start Freddie Ljungberg...let me know if the site is loading reasonably fast for you.  Thanks!

tags: blogging  fredrik ljungberg  impeachment  dubya  

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