Staying with blogger, and speeding things up.

Unfortunately, the attempt to export to WordPress… well, just didn’t work well for me.  I’d forgotten that my webhosting package just doesn’t seem to like anything with large amounts of SQL queries, and a blog this size (1600+ posts!) is a lot of SQL queries.

So instead, I decided to use what I’d learned to update, streamline, and otherwise make this load faster.

So you’ll notice the “pages” are a menu bar now – and that the “books” section has been moved to its own page to reduce page load times.  Yes, I’m that much of a geek that I’d rather decrease pageload times than shout “BUY THIS STUFF” all over the place.

I stripped out all the social media widgets as well, except for a bare-bones sharing one.  Likewise, I stripped out most of the dynamically updating widgets – including the profile and anti-blerch one.  I changed some fonts to ones a bit more commonly used, and added the header picture which I’ve been using on social media and elsewhere.

This reduced the page load size from 320k to 120k.  That’s three times as fast.   (Pedants who want to talk about threaded requests can go ahead and do so…elsewhere.)

So, here’s the same blog, somewhat faster than the old blog.