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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Blog Appreciation:
Dosh Dosh always has an article or two of interest to most bloggers. I just added it to my feed reader!
