Vysnu, slower or swankier?
Monday, February 23, 2004
I’m in a bit of a spot lately regarding this blog. As you probably have experienced, this page takes around ten seconds (average, on my less than 10KB/s connection) to load. Sig9, which is hosted on the same server, manages to chunk out a page in under two seconds. While the Sig9 main page is focused, small and sweet (largely due to Vivek), Vysnu looks and acts like a pig bladder - bloated out of proportion.
So why do I persist with this design? One of the major reasons is that Vysnu is blue. While many other people have white blogs, Vysnu embraces the Grecian Jug, at first mostly because I was so fed up of black on white. But every design also takes a cost in usability and I fear this is getting too unwieldy.
For a few days, I’ve been playing with an alternate, much lighter layout. As you can see, it’s black on white (though it has a few nifty tricks). But I’m stuck between worlds here because I really like the current layout too and it would have been a non-issue had page-load speeds been faster.
So I’m turning to you people, what do you think? Do you think the page-load speeds are bearable? What parts of the site do you rarely use (the kewl links, the categories, the outside links, the archives), what things should I scrap? Should I start over with a newer, faster layout? Tell me any suggestions you have and since I’m going to work on this site anyway, tell me anything that you want added 
to this site.
I’m also pursuing other methods to speed up this site, so if you think something has blazed up suddenly, it isn’t you =)
Tags: vysnu.com
Although speeds are bearable, I would suggest that changing any aspect of the cms or the layout for a litle more speed would do more good than harm. Its the content that matters, and in Vysnu.com’s case thats what *really* matters ;). Of the various sections, I love `kewl links’ the most - keep it up.
Comment by Vivek — Monday, 23 February 2004 @ 14:29:56
Hey Vivek, thanks for the comments. I enabled gzip compression, it seems to have speeded things up a lot. I think I’m going to ditch the new layout and work on completing this one…like redoing this godawful comment form, it looks yucky :-(. I’ll prolly create an archive for kewl as well. Thanks!
Comment by qhitch — Monday, 23 February 2004 @ 14:48:28
The speeds are bearable. The present design is awesome, blue rocks :D. Kewl section, is a favourite, so are the archives. Wouldn’t complain about the comment form either, as long as you have a place for rants ;). Keep up the excellent work, Qhitch.
Comment by Link — Monday, 23 February 2004 @ 19:04:15
Link, I’ll prolly redo this comment form in the same vein, just changing somethings to fit the layout. I also have an idea to trump comment spam (I’ve been getting almost 3-4/week) so I’ll maybe do that too. Thanks!
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