What Have You

Today, I have made a few changes to this blog which consumed so much of my time (again). And goodness gracious, I had a terrible headache (again).

One of the changes that frequent visitors will notice is the Blogroll. I have installed a dropdown blogroll plugin (5 times, 5 different WordPress plugins) to minimize the clutter in my sidebar. My blogroll is increasing so I thought I might as well clean up my own mess after all the link-building efforts I have put in this blog for 6 weeks now.

Next, I put a Linker for other blogs to exchange links with me (in case they want to). However, I plan to migrate the Linker’s content to my Friends’ Blogs section after some time for the same reason that I installed a dropdown plugin – to save some space in my sidebar. The links shown in the Linker section may
not be permanent, meaning I might delete some entries, as a form of control on my part as a blog owner. I really love linking with other blogs because this will increase my PR someday somehow but… some jerks I’ve encountered just won’t link back after 5 days or more. In this regard, nobody can blame me if I delete some links in the Linker when people linking with me won’t behave as they should. This is a bad practice for some spammers. They link up with you and hope that they will get away from it by making forgetfulness as a lame excuse. Informing them won’t help much, I tell you. Although in some cases, someone forgetting to link back your blog to theirs is understandable because of the workload bloggers have. Let’s face it, many bloggers are much busier building links than posting articles. For spammers, this is most likely the case.

Further, the comments in this blog are regulated (despite the fact that I have adopted DOFOLLOW). The comments may still appear but since I have installed a NOFOLLOW CASE BY CASE plugin, this means that I can still tag the comment with NOFOLLOW if it’s either a) spam-like; b) stupid; or c) senseless. Ah, I think I’ll just delete comments if that’s the case. Lol! For serious (or at least trying to be serious) blogger like myself, I love comments that can encourage and add to healthy discussions embedded within my posts. In the first place, I try all so hard to improve my posts so that others can learn, and perhaps be entertained. I think it’s just fair if I filter some comments posted by my readers in a non-invasive way. I suggest, other bloggers should also implement some form of control within the limitations of their blogs.

Then I have this small widget I frequently see on so many of my friends’ blogs – the Cbox shoutbox. It’s a cool thing to add in any blog to enrich interaction between the blogger and blog readers (especially between friends).

But here comes the big BUT…. No, not my behind. Some side effects. Well, widgets and plugins are cool and they add zest to our blogging life, but they consume so much bandwidth that some people get tired of waiting for your blog to load properly. If your blog is self-hosted and your web hosting plan has FASTCGI ACCELERATION capability, you might want to enable it so that PHP files common to blogs will load faster.

However, the most common culprits in slowing down the loading time of your blog are the servers of widget providers. Take for example Mybloglog, Bolgcatalog or Bumpzee. These blog directories also suffer from slowdowns. Their servers go down just like anyone else’s. These incidents will put so much load on loading time since web browsers will not be able to “fetch” information from these servers fast.

I hope these info and pieces of advice will somehow help readers of this blog. Your reactions and comments will be highly appreciated. Blogging is fun. Let’s keep it that way. If we can only make things simpler by minimizing problems I have mentioned above, then blog life would be fun as it should be.

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