Return of the Blogroll
By popular demand, the blogroll has returned to the main page (in its customary spot near the top of the right sidebar) at least temporarily. Kathy Kinsley has set up a cached version of the blogroll as per Kevin Aylward‘s instructions, which should theoretically preclude the incessant outages at blogrolling.com from interfering with page loads. If the fix works, the blogroll will stay. The link at the top of the page will remain as well.
I read OTB quite a lot. In the past there was always a 1 or 2 second delay when bringing up your blogroll even on good days. Now there is no noticeable delay at all.
Just the casual observation of one reader, if it means anything.
I haven’t been able to get my head around your posts on the Blogrolling problem, because I’ve never experienced any significant degradation of page rendering on OTB, my own blog, or anywhere else.
I’d be surprised to learn that I’ve just missed the problem every time it’s occurred, but I suppose that’s a possibility.
Interesting. In my experience, blogrolling is down A LOT. Although usually in spurts–several days of really lousy service every few months and occasional lags otherwise. But it cripples the loading of a page if they’re down, as the browser just keeps waiting. The same is true of SiteMeter, but that’s no bigger since I keep it way at the bottom of the page, loading well after the rest of the site.
I’ve only noticed a lag from blogrolling one or two times – the more major outages they had just after Tucows took over. The main problem is Sitemeter, I think. I dropped it from my blog all together and I notice my own page loads faster now.
Of course, my internal server issues are another matter, but there’s not much I can do about that since I’m not in a position to change my hosting just yet.
I was out of town during the last (reported) Blogrolling.com outage. I think I commented in another thread here that I really didn’t notice a problem loading my own blog page except for the absence of the blogroll.
I tried to switch my blogroll to PHP to eliminate as much of a load delay as I could with my format, but Verve doesn’t enable a key parameter to make the PHP version work. And I’ve never been able to get the blogroll cache to work (maybe the same reason).
thanks