RSS Feeds: Errands, Connectivity and Being Too Deep
I'm a bit behind the power curve today. I had to head to the bank shortly after I woke up this morning and waited for quite some time for business to get taken care of. It's the first working day of their month (May 1 was their labor day) and the bank was packed with people collecting their beginning of the month paycheck. Direct deposits for military and social security retirees and/or their dependents as well as remittances from several countries have a tendency to overload their banking staff. It all came in on the 1st.
I left from there and had to head over to the college at Cubi Point on SBMA (the former naval station). My son has to take a remedial class on anatomy along with 5 other students. It appears they all failed the course by a fraction of a point. The class will start next week, for two weeks, and will be followed by a new exam. The nursing degree program is pretty important and they admit that there might have been a small amount of miscommunication between the teacher and students. I spent more than 3 hours there.
When I returned, well after 3 pm, I discovered my broadband connectivity was really bad. At first I thought it was my host, but it was taking up to 5 minutes to bring up ANY website, even Google's main search page (and you know how little there is on that page). I did manage to answer one comment before I stopped being able to bring the page back up. Shortly after 5:15 pm, everything was back to normal. I have no idea where the bottleneck was, but Internet lines get disrupted for various reasons on this island. The last time I had no connectivity whatsoever was several hours and caused by a construction equipment operator taking a chunk out of the fiber optic line.
While I was incommunicado, Comedy from Comedy Plus remarked over at Necessary Skills that some of what I write is way too deep and Peter replied that he agreed. Well, I want both of them to know that I'll try not to be too deep too often. I sometimes do cross over the line into territory that's unfamiliar to many readers and aimed at a particular group. Sorry for that, but sometimes I can't help myself. If I try to hold all that stuff in, my head will explode.
I've got to get to work. I promised Marielyn from Tiny Signs that I'd "drive-by" her blog and she's relatively new. I need to pick her blog apart and offer some constructive criticism. She's from Pangasinan, Philippines and practically a neighbor.
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RT, I thought you were moving to a host outside the Phillipines? Well, I would suggest one thing in your blog design. Put the content section ahead of the sidebar sections. The content is the last part to load always and sometimes it's really slow.
All the third party widgets should probably be loaded right at the end. Should not be hard to do because the CSS takes care of the positioning and you just need to change the order of the DIV elements.
I eventually will, Hari, when certain things happen. It could be in two weeks or less.
I haven't had the desire to reorder everything in the design yet. The CSS isn't a problem, but I'm thinking of changing a lot of it to make it more efficient. The original CSS has an unnecessary MSIE hack and dynamic widget support and I need neither of those. I'm waiting until I have stability and enough bandwidth to make almost instantaneous changes. I don't have either right now.
Actually, I did just move the sidebars after the content. I'm not sure how to make the widgets last without putting them in the footer, so I'll hold off on that for now.
Yeah, I also noticed it's faster now. This theme is quite good with it's three column layout. But I myself tend to use two-column layouts which I think are cleaner.
I thought about using two column, but decided against it. I don't like jamming everything on one side. That's a personal preference.
You need to get a new host soon. Why just yesterday I was trying to read your blog and it was just dead…
How can I come over here and start
argumentsdebates if your site is hosed?Yesterday it was the host's fault. Today it was the island's fault. Hopefully, I can get something scraped together and a new host in a couple of weeks. I'm crossing my own fingers.
Hi RT just to clarify that deep means to me that you make me think and thats why I keep coming back. Must be a glutton for punishment eh :)
RT – First I'm sorry that you are having problems with your new provider.
Secondly, don't go 1st grade just for Peter and I. You have a great audience that are a lot more techno prone than we are. So, don't pay attention to us. I come here every day and I won't stop. Well, I will if you pull the plug. Please don't do that…PLEASE :)