A Cleaner Slate—Did you notice?

Yesterday, Kate called my attention regarding my super slow blog site. My blog is normally slow but it isn’t SUPER slow. Well, not until yesterday.

I attribute the normal slowness of my blog to my backgrounds and banners. I may have also overdone the widgets at my side bar. It’s just that I wanted my blog to feature fun widgets, show off badges, record guests and their comments, enlist a blog roll, and display buttons that would potentially bring in money to my site.

But then a bug or perhaps a megabyte overload is screwing up with my blog’s system, hence the problem.

I can only do so much with my beginner’s understanding of HTML and its magic. So the immediate solution I could come up with was to reduce the size of all design elements on my blog and, although I hated to do it, make do with a static welcome banner as compared to the formerly animated one. But since that was not enough, I had to let go of some widgets, too. I did keep my “tools for the workshop” though for my own “consumption.” I benefit from the word-of-the-day feed. I replaced with a linked photo the embedded video of Project: Brave Kids, the cause I would have liked to support as much as I can. Eventually I also had to discard several of my “business” buttons, including the Firefox download button from Google Adsense. I was really tempted to remove my Adsense box altogether since I barely earned anything from it. I decided to eliminate the ads in between my posts instead. I’ll reserve my Adsense’ fate for later.

My blog seems to be loading faster now. By “faster” I mean, not SUPER slow, but slow nonetheless. If an expert is reading this now, I will appreciate any troubleshooting advice from you.

Three good things that came out of it though are as follows: One, my torn sheet of paper for my background is cleaner than it was before (I cleaned up most of the water stains); two, my side bar is less cluttered; and three, I don’t feel much like a sell out now that the non-earning “business” buttons are gone.