Eric Odom

One of my New Years’ Resolutions was to clean up my blogs and get them all back on track. It hasn’t been easy…

That being said, it HAS been easy to identify things in my sidebars that I can live without. You know, like, for example, that silly widget that made perfect sense a few months back? Yeah, the one that serves no purpose but to slow your blog down.

Speaking of blog speed, I’ve noticed a lot of blogs lately have really started adding the weight on. Some of the blogs I read normally (won’t mention names), are starting to take anywhere from 8 to 20 seconds to load. This, folks, is WAY too long.

I’m still having trouble getting all of my blogs to load in 3 seconds or less, but I’m getting close and things are improving. Anyway… back to the topic at hand.

Some of the things you can do to minimize clutter are listed below:

1) Community Widgets
I’ve decided to scrap the MyBlogLog widget on pretty much all of my blogs. I like the concept behind MBL, but the widget itself is clunky, slow loading, and really doesn’t help much in the overall scheme of things.

It was nice at first, but I just don’t think I need it around.

Ironically, after removing MBL from this blog the load time was cut down but just over 2 seconds. That’s darn significant if you ask me.

2) Javascript Blogrolls
I know a lot of you like them, but honestly, a lot of your readers hate them.

These aren’t quite as bad outside of the political blogging scene, but inside the political blogosphere you’ll find blogs with hundreds, if not thousands of blogs in their multiple blogrolls.

Most of these are powered by Blogrolling, which is an extremely slow piece of code that bogs down the server when loading the page.

3) # of Posts on the Homepage
Have you ever seen one of those blogs that has 30+ posts on the homepage? I certainly have… and I don’t remember sticking around long enough to find out what any of them are about.

As you probably noticed by now, I’m becoming picky about page load times. Slow loading pages have not always been a peeve of mine, but lately they seem to be growing in numbers and I find myself doing a lot of waiting when trying to access posts.

If I’m leaving your blog before the page finishes loading, the chances are that someone else is doing the same.

4) Navigation
This should be pretty straightforward.

-How do I get back to the homepage?
-Where can I go to find information pages?
-Who are you? And what is this site about?
-How can I contact you?

That’s really all I want to know. I notice a lot of blogs have 15 pages in their navigation, but no contact information. What up wit dat?

Keep it simple.

5) Animation and Sounds
Please, for the love of God, get rid of your animations and sounds. I thought this became common knowledge a few years back, but apparently a few bloggers missed the memo.

Other than that, just go through your sidebar, footer and header, looking to see if there is anything there that can be stripped out.

A clean and fast blog is what we’re after.

-Eric