If you happen to notice the layout here at SEB missing chunks here and there over the next day or so don’t be too concerned, it’s just me messing with the layout to see if I can figure out why it’s so slow.
Of all the blogs I host my own is the slowest in terms of posting new entries and comments and I’m pretty sure it has to do with some of the funky crap I’m doing with various plugins and file imports. This hasn’t been a big deal for the most part until I installed Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist plugin. The plugin itself works great and it’s activated for all the other blogs I use without issue, but when I try to use it with SEB the time it takes to post a new comment shoots from an already plodding 27 seconds to over 3 minutes and 45 seconds. Ouch. Seeing as it works fine on the other blogs I host here without any significant increase in the time it takes to post new content I can only assume that there’s something about my layout specifically that’s causing things to be slow.
The only way to figure out what’s going on will be to rip the site apart in chunks, test it minus the chunk in question and put it back together again. I’d been meaning to do that anyway to try and cut down the 27 seconds it normally takes to post a new comment so this is a good excuse to get around to fixing things up. MT-Blacklist is way to useful not to activate it on SEB.
If you could set it so that the content loads before the links at the site, rather than after, then that would be great. I’ve acheived it on my site (mainly because that’s how the default MT template does it) - maybe you could take that apart and play with it.
Perhaps a few less posts on the home page would be nice too - it’s a lot of data for us poor dial-up users to have to face.