Coming Out and Tumbling Over
The astute readers would have probably realised that I have removed a lot of “visual pollution” caused by chicklets, widgets and scripts. The objective was really to increase load times, improve readability flow and make this site a more attractive place that people would want to visit.
Notable removals include Flickr, Twitter, Mybloglog, and Blog Catalogue. Even though I still support the community created by Mybloglog or Blog Catalogue, the widgets are not perfect and have have a tendency to stall the loading of my Sidebar and the Footer that gets called after it.
However there are still some intrinsic value for showing information provided from certain widgets like Flickr and Twitter. Therefore I’ve decided to start a Tumble blog at DesignSojourn.net. This site is essentially a central node or network of images (Flickr), rants (Twitter), inspiration (links, videos, pictures etc.) and other RSS streams from blogs I manage, that inspires the content that you read on this blog. Thus this “center of a spider’s web” is aptly called DesignSojourn.Net. In other words just replace the usual .com at the end of this site with .net and that should get you there.
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On another more important note, I’ve decided to “come out” yet again on the Internet. My first tentative step was posted here on June 16, 2006. So if you are interested, which I think most of you would NOT be, you can get a good picture of what I do “off-line” via my “Linked In” badge on my About page or just below in the “Meet DT” section.
In the last year or so, I was getting involved in a lot of on-line communities and design discussions, as a result it become too confusing (to me that is!) to keep running two identities. Also most of the readers already know who I am in real life and with all the new friends I have made via this blog, not “coming out” just did not make sense.
Regardless of this I will still use Design Translator (DT) in many of my discussions, as it is still an accurate reflection of my real life persona and still a really fun writing pseudonym that I enjoy!
DT
September 19, 2007 at 10:10 amHi drew,
I agree with you totally! It is really more for the author. I wonder if it could be put off site some how…
drew kora
September 18, 2007 at 8:14 pmThanks for moving those widgets. Load times are exponentially faster now.
…I actually never used them anyway. : )
DT
September 17, 2007 at 5:17 pmHi Stephen,
Thanks for your message. That might be a good mid term compromise, but in the long run, either they do something with the script, if not a lot of bloggers will drop it eventually.
Cutting it out saved me almost 1 second off my load times, you should consider it.
Stephen Cronin
September 17, 2007 at 4:02 pmI’m in the middle of a site redesign and I’m considering getting rid of the BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog widgets too for the same reason. I may add them at the very end of the footer after everything important has loaded. I’d like to keep them if I can, but they do bog down page loads and that’s not acceptable.