MyBlogLog Page Bloat

So you took a look, like me, at MyBlogLog and figured it’d be a nice way to build up the community around your blog - right?

No big deal, you add the code into your page and let er rip.

Not satisfied with the normal look that you’re given, you decide to modify how your MyBlogLog widget looks. Here’s what you come up with (a pretty standard look):

Everything is wonderful and great until you notice that your pages are running a bit slower. Why is this you ask yourself? There’s got to be a reason!

You know that you don’t have any other large images or html that could be causing page bloat but your pages are still loading slowly.

So, you pull out YSlow to check the performance of your page.

That’s when you get a report that looks something like this:

Look at the Empty Cache side of the image above. Do you see how many images are loading? 61 images!!! That’s more than 2/3 of the all of the HTTP requests that are getting sent out.

If you consider for a moment that the default is for pipelining to be turned off, you’ll realize that your page is going to be loading much, much slower with the MyBlogLog widget on the page.

To solve this problem, you’ve basically got two choices.

1. Use a MyBlogLog widget that doesn’t have as many users displayed.
2. Optimize your page load time.

I’m debating which approach I should take right now. Some blogs out there go with the minimalist approach while others load their pages up with all kinds of widgets and what not.

What are your thoughts?

G-Man