Blog Tips - Hacking Your Blog to Death

Bloke’s Blog Tip for the Day:

No, I’m not talking about those morons who try to sneak in the back door of your computer and seize control of it. What I am talking about is those clever programmers who create amazing scripts that will turn your ordinary blog into a living, breathing Content Management System on steroids (well almost).

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of hacking wizardry and I use some javascript with this blog. They enable me to make my blog fido do tricks that it was never intended to.But by overdoing it a lot of bloggers are violating the first (or maybe its the second or third) rule of good webmastering — “Thou shalt not make your readers wait for your site to load”.In other words, their blogs take way too long to load in a browser because there are just too many scripts waiting in line. You know the ones I’m talking about. Even after their blog has finally appeared to have loaded, it can still be unresponsive or sluggish indefinitely, slowing your computer to a crawl which can be extremely frustrating from a user’s standpoint.Like I’ve said before, internet surfers have little patience and demand immediate gratification. The simple matter of it is, the more scripts you have the longer your site will take to load or respond, and you therefore risk losing readers. New users especially will not wait more than a few seconds, and will eagerly click on that next link losing you a potential reader forever.

That goes for myself included, and I won’t hesitate to close down a site rather than waste my time waiting for it to finish loading. When I’m visiting your site it’s probably because you wrote a post that caught my eye — not how cool your menus work. Again, don’t get me wrong because I like cool as much as anybody, but not when it is to the detriment of your blog’s performance.

So if you find yourself relying too much on scripts (and that includes widgets as well) then my advice is you should be looking for another blogging platform that already has the features you want built in, (or through the use of plugins/addons that are specifically designed to extend its capability).

Overdosing on scripts can be fatal to your blog. I have a great respect for the mastery of gifted scripters, but there is also such a thing as too much of a good thing. Moderation is the rule, especially in good web (blog) design.

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Addendum: After being taken out to the shed for a good paddling by my buddy CyberCoder, he reminded me that I should make clear that I’m talking predominantly javascript here… not ajax. Ajax is designed to improve a web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability. Now that is COOL!

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