1 Yeesh, can it be any more bizzy?!
I thought that Harvey wanted to move cause it would take less time to load...

Have mercy on us dial-uppers!!!

2 That's why I wanted to see what the problems were BEFORE I moved the site.

As cheap as broadband is nowadays, I can't beleive anyone wgo spends any time at all on-line is still on dial-up... what was your connect rate?

3 The blue page bg is 11k and loads 1 time, the light blue sidebar bg is 2.76k and loads 1 time, the sidetitle bg is 2.14 k and loads 1 time... I don't think that is what slows the load times... the banner images are pretty big (238k) so that will slow it down - need to make them transparent gifs?... and I still have the sidebar images on the radio server, so that may slow the load times down too. And I probably will have to resize the original sidebar images instead of doing it with HTML tag attributes... the ecoystem and sitemeter scripts are on the bottom of the right column and load last... there is another script on the left... the sidebars are module includes... what else is going to slow it down?... the comment show/hide script - page isn't big enough to slow it down... the trackback show/hide script - ditto...

Anyway, I'm still working on it... How is the load time on my site?

4 Does anyone - if anybody actually goes over there - have load time problems with my site on dial up? If not, the problem is the banner image size and the images still hosted on the radio serever.

5 I try to keep any graphics like my banners and such to

The only thing I saw was that the right column was overrun by the center, but I think that's because you had the wide banner graphics in a post, which caused the center to overexpand to show the whole thing. I've done it on RJ too.

6 Sorry 'bout that. The first line was supposed to say "...banners and such to less than 75k. Try using the .jpg format instead of .gif too, it compresses smaller."

7 It loaded quickly for me (I'm on hi-speed) but when I hit F5 the same page reloaded with no changes that I could see (but then I can be incredibly unobservant on visual things.)

I'm using IE 6.0 with resolution of 800x600.

HTH.

8 Avant 9.02. Loads fine (cable modem) and looks good, too. My favorite is the transparent banner.

Any other testing I can do?

Poke Harv with a stick?

I'm here to help.

Love,
Em

9 Oh yeah! Looks great on my 1280x1024, too.

I like 'em big. Monitors, that is.

10 You can get the banner down to under 20kb if you split it up into 2 images (left and right), crop it and make sure you aren't resizing in browser.

Positioning the bits will be 'fun' but not impossible. Oh and you can shave another 3kb off that by using normal text for the "A Celebration of things ..." sentance.

Other observations. Your alpha doesn't work in Mozilla but it can do - you just need to hide the mozilla alpha style from IE. I think ALA had a tutorial on this.

Becuase of the alpha in IE the BG to the banner looks a bit funny.

The alpha doesn't carry across to the indi archives

Everything else seems to be ok (although personal preference that BG is just nasty but for some reason i can see Harvey being very happy there

11 have you got more info on the text sizes bug?

12 Emma: Harvey's always up for a good round of pokin'!

13 Debbye: The banner should change, although sometimes the random nuymber selecting the banner will come up the same several times. There are eight different banners in the rotation you can look at.

14 Thank you to everyone for your feedback! I'll discuss your various solution with my graphics artist and get this thing loading faster for everyone. I think that after I move all the images to MuNu, the load times will improve a lot.

Rob re: Text Bug in IE
In my site: Ii've been using Mozilla 1.6 for viewing and quit using IE. After I did the AdAware thingy, I loaded back up and viewed my new design. I noticed that the sidetitles and date and post title text is very small in IE compared to the size in Mozilla. I know there are differences in how the two browsers render the box model, but have never heard anything about rendering text differently. The font is a fairly common script style font. It rendered smaller initially in Mozilla, so I jacked up the sizes bit so it would look right with the other text.

Here is the problem. When I try to manipulate the text sizes for IE it doesn't seem to do anything. I've tried using %, assigning a PT size, assigning a PX size, assigning the +/- attributes to change sizes, and tried x-large/xx-large etc and nothing seems to change the text size in IE.

In the MabLab site, the post text (100%) is rendering smaller (than the posted by line text (80%)? Whassup wid dat? What would cause that? In doing a test design, sometimes I make a change, insert the new code after the original code so that is the instruction the should be rendered, and comment out the original code. If I don't like the change, I can delete it and use the original again.

Anyway... thanks for any help you can give me on this particular issue, cause it's freakin me out!!!

15 Harvey's always up for a good...pokin'!

Hmmm...filing that away for later use.

Anyway, the only thing I see wrong is the size of the calendar. If you use less padding, it should work fine!

I also agree with the site being very busy. It's not so much a load time thing for me (I'm on cable server), but an esthetic thing. But, each person has their individual style, and I think this style fits the type of blog. Very nice work!

16 OSX 10.3.3

Safari 1.2

1440x900 (17" Powerbook)

Looks fine.

banner #9 for me

17 Mr Rob: It looks like my text sizing problem is related to my screen resolution. I'm on a crappy monitor at 1024x768 / 256 colors and everything looks fine as far as text sizing. But I still haven't be able to effect any noticable changes at 1280x1024... weird stuff maynard.

18 Erm, I've whisked through the code and the CSS and can see no obivious problems. I also am unable to recreate the problem on either my home or my work PC at any resolution... Very, very confusing. You're definitely running IE 6.0.2?

I'll keep looking but can't see anything wrong with the CSS.

19 I think has something to do with my video driver on this Dell laptop. I don;t seem to have the problem anywhere else. I'll just have to live with it I guess.

Thanks for taking your valuable time to look at my spaghetti code... I made my last set of changes and haven't made a backup copy and cleaned up yet. I'll do that soon and use the old CSS as a skin.

Thanks again for you assistance.

20 Yay!