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Bloggers getting bigger and messier

But not in the way you think...

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Blog front pages are now large pages of images and scripts rather than the pared-down text pages of old.

The average-sized front page is 934KB and 35 per cent are over 1MB, according to researchers who looked at Technorati's top 100 blogs.

Images were the main contributor to front page size - making up 61.3 per cent of total size, next were scripts with 17.2 per cent. Scripts are typically add-on functions to blogs like those which record visitor numbers. The average number of script files on a front page was nine.

These file sizes mean that a surfer with a low-end broadband connection of 256kbits/s would take 33 seconds, at best, to load a blog front page of 1MB. On a dial-up modem this would take 2 minutes 30 seconds.

Researchers from Pingdom suggested that bloggers, keen to get as many readers as possible, pay more attention to optimising their front pages for those on slower connections.

Bloggers should consider reducing the number of images on their front page as well as compressing them or using smaller images. Merging scripts into one file should also improve load times for readers. ®

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Latest Comments

Slow connection, or slow users?

Presumably, users who are stuck with slow network connections,* and for some reason want to read a bunch of bloggers who fill their pages with images, would simply disable automatic loading of images, and only download the ones that seemed like they might be important.

Or perhaps they're idiots who'd rather waste half a minute waiting for unnecessary eye-candy on each page than figure out how to do that.

(*) Insert rant about today's spoiled kids and their "slow" 256kbps connections.

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Get used to it

You are no longer in control.

The bloggers can do what they like. Get over it.

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No ! No ! Nooo !

Blogs DO NOT need to be optimized !

They NEED to be as precise and as big as possible, because BIG means MORE INFORMATION (and, especially, lots more time to load).

So PLEEAAASE do not tell them to optimize anything. I'm looking forward to upwards of 30 minutes load time on dial-up, and at least 5 minutes on broadband.

Come on guys, you can DO it (no I won't use that other slogan - not yet).

Maybe, just maybe, when their bloated, useless rantings are 100MB a page, maybe those clueless nitwits who have nothing better to do with their time than read inane babblings from nutjobs with nothing important to say will finally decide that it's not worth their cheap time and go watch TV.

At least on TV they might learn something.

And the nutters with too much time on their hands to say nothing in very large; badly punctuated, sentences: will finally just spout their inanities in the virtual desert they deserve.

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