RSS Feeds: I Made Some Radical Adjustments
When I made some adjustments before, I was concentrating on making the visual layout a little more appealing. Today, I did something more radical and I plan to keep it that way.
I deactivated the global translator and removed the widget for it from my right sidebar. There were several reasons. First, it didn't work quite right. Second, after checking logs and when comment spam came in, I found that spammers were using it more than anyone else. Third, it wouldn't work at all without its own cache being on (the translate engines kept flagging them as spam URLs). There were too many bad reasons to keep it on there and not enough good reasons. Since my blog is in English and my target audience (if you can call it that) are English speakers (even as a second language), I'm not worried about losing readers. The majority of my readers come from:
- US
- UK
- Philippines
- Canada
- India
- Romania
- Australia
- Malaysia
Guess what? There were no translations available for any of those (other than the English-speaking countries) anyway.
The other thing I did, which I tested a week ago, is to make the sidebars load after the content. It involved moving one line in five different files and not that hard at all. Yesterday, I moved the third party widgets to the end of the right sidebar. Now, when you load a page, you see the content first, then the sidebars, and then the footer. If the right sidebar and footer takes a little longer than usual, it no longer matters — you get to see the page you're looking for right away because of the display order.
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Dosh Dosh always has an article or two of interest to most bloggers. I just added it to my feed reader!
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Nice work RT. Great idea on loaded the sidebars after the content. :)
Actually, that was Hari's idea. I just ran with it.
I think the K2 theme actually comes with this as on CruftBucket this happens without me having to alter it. Obviously custom themes are going to be different and i don't think i'll be using K2 again, it was really used just to try it out.
It is definitely the way to go though, waiting for the content to load is indeed a matter of losing visitors.
These are good changes. As for a translator, while google has its own translators, they are less than satisfactory. But in any case, automated translators generally are of very poor quality. The technology still is at a very nascent stage. The nuances of human languages are too much for computers to handle.
Details man! Tell me how to do that (the load order)or point me in the right direction and I'll send you my first born.
Actually, that's less of an incentive, and more of a threat….
THANK YOU for the content before sidebars! Your site was killing me on my sidekick… I wish everyone would do that.