When Widget Servers Are Down, Loading Time of Blogs Go Down
I’m back to blogging after a “day-off”. Whew! What a day without checking stats.
This post’s title says it all. When widgets load terribly slow, the loading time of a blog slows down too.
Today, the auto Linker found in this site and a couple of hundred more sites using it suffered a downtime for almost day. “The bandwidth exceeded its limit”, so said their server by way of their home page. This incident is not confined to Linker alone. Other widgets can do the same to our blogs. And this can hurt us pretty badly as bloggers. The fact that most of us do not have our own servers mean that we are at the mercy of corporate resources. Meaning, if our web host and widgets’ servers go down, our sites go down and we may lose readers if they see our sites crawling.
I have also observed random outages from Yahoo’s servers lately. this is by way of the widget of Mybloglog. It really takes a while before the recent readers load properly. Worse is the Bumpzee widget which is slower.
Well, this is partly understood since these servers work 24/7 getting thousands of page hits per minute. I just hope we can still maintain a wide readership despite these outages.
What about you? Have you observed anything unusual about your widgets lately?
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Hi! I linked to your blog, as you requested. I’d love a link exchange, too
Thanks!
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Not at the moment, no but sometimes when the sidebar’s overloaded with widgets.. it does take a few seconds slower than the posts to load up.
I think the big question is how many posts should be on the front page, as that’s the main thing that’s slowing stuff down.
Btw, do you know of a wp plugin that converts categories to tags in a seamless fashion?
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nga pala… i think pwedeng pwede mo ng isabak itong blog mo sa sponsoredreviews.com…. meron ka ng more than 10 posts at i noticed mataas ang link pop mo at alexa ranking (considering the age of your blog).
maraming opportunity doon… pwedend pwede itong blog mo. cheers!
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@ sherry,
at the moment i haven’t encountered any plugin of that type… you may search further in google or yahoo but i know that would be a difficult task. just be patient.
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the bumpzee widget is the culprit hehehe… but it’s fun seeing more people visiting eh?
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btw i linked to you na, hope you link back too!
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@ Evil Woobie,
yeah, bumpzee API is the culprit, it’s one widget that’s most of the time problematic. i’ve linked u back my dear. thanks and merry xmas!
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@ jps61974
There’s so many new terms and bugs and stuff to learn on wp, it’s like some sort of hazing ritual, I saw some category to tag thing inside wp 2.3 and used it like teh little noob I am.
Turns out it actually deletes all categories in the process, I had to do a full database restore to undo the screwup.
Another thing that I don’t understand is how spambots are such a big issue in wp. In blogger, it’s never an issue at all. Does this represent a fundamental flaw in wp?
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@ Sherry,
yes, that’s the problem with WP, spams…. however, may i suggest that you activate your akismet plugin. this will help a lot since akismet is a very handy tool in catching spam comments. this will not stop spam comments from coming but it will definitely stop them from appearing in ur comments page.
as for me, i don’t worry about spam so much… just delete all of them at the same time when i have time. i only entertain legitimate comments like yours here
if u need any assistance in enabling akismet, pls let me know
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That’s why I stay away from widgets that are not an approved third party plug in with WordPress.
It just is so much hassle. And it’s a real pain going to the website that takes forever to load.
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normally bumpzee, mybloglog, and blogcatalog widgets are the main culprits. however, i find them indispensable because they give me a reference to whom I need to return the courtesy next.
4 to 6 posts with an average of 200 words each is the ideal, according to SEO experts, for faster loading. further, if your page does not load in less than 12 seconds, you might want to remove some of the widgets. for the same time frame is almost the same amount you need to keep your visitors reading.
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I din realize it will make blogs go down…. probably we should cut off some widgets on our site.. so make sure the blogs load faster right
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this is one of the reasons why I removed many widgets…
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@ Bisdak Babbles
i can’t blame you sis. ako rin, i have deleted some widgets but added some new ones. ngek! i will have to determine yet what widgets shall i remove after some more testing. merry xmas my dear friend!
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@ MERDURIAN
yes that could be helpful… but i suggest u identify the culprit first before deleting them… refer to RONNIE’S comments who said that Mybloglog, Bumpzee and Blogcatalog widgets are what slow down his blog… same for me… i might as well think about deleting a widget or two.
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[...] content-wise. It may load at times at a crawling rate due to the widgets (which I have discussed in When Widget Servers Are Down, Loading Time of Blogs Go Down). I really don’t know how well this loads in your browser but in my end, it’s just [...]