7 Steps to Making a Fast Loading Blog

You can call me "56k Man" I fight for truth, justice, and lowly dial up users who love to read blogs, but don't like waiting upwards to 3 and a half minutes for the page to load up.

Weapon of choice Lucky Seven Revolver(seven ways bloggers can make their blogs 56k friendly).

1.) If you like to do image intensive posts, limit the number of posts to 5 a page. I never understood why bloggers felt the need to display more than a handful of posts at a time. A whole months worth of your updates on the start page just looks like overkill.

2.) limit the size of your banner. If I need to scroll down in order to see your newest blog post, it's probably too large. Anything under 250 px. high is good.

3.) Keep animated gifs to an absolute minimum. For the most part, I haven't seen any repeat offenders breaking this unwritten rule in a long time. I remember a a blog a few years ago that had gifs featuring characters from the cartoon show, Inuyasha. Nothing about that mess of a show deserves having a 800k .gif dedicated to it.

4.) Post thumbnails as opposed to full sized images(imageShack has thumbnails, and you can resize images uploaded to blogger.) Most people will have no problem with clicking on a reasonably sized thumbnail to display a full sized imaged. 9 times out of ten, you won't even need to tell people it's a clickable thumbnail. They'll just know!

5.) Limit the number of scripts/widgets you use. Keep only the ones you need. As of this articles publish date, blogger's Followers widget is crap. It's almost always the last thing to load, and most people who use it prefer to remain anonymous anyway. Just display a Feedburner link and move on already.

6.) Use the Online Image Optimizer to reduce the file size of your less important images. What's that? You say every .jpeg and .gif animation you display on your blog is the most important thing evah? That's a crock and you know it.

7. ) Use post summaries instead of displaying the full blog post. It's another helpful tip for photobloggers who assume each and every picture they snap with their over elaborate cameras is sure gold. You all know who you are.

You know how some bloggers type things like "more pics/video clips after the jump"? They do this to spare the bandwidth and time of people who don't wish to see each and every little piece of forgettable content they update their blogs with. It's called courtesy, pass it on.