Nerve Endings Firing Away

Perhaps I have been paying far too much attention on the backend of this blog instead of writing more frequently. But the good news is that, I might have run out of things to tweak. And perhaps, it was tweaked just a wee bit much when the site was temporarily suspended just a while back for causing a inordinate amount of server load (more details on that later). The TCH Support Staff was quick to respond and worked doubly quick to restore my site. Anyway, things will be a bit slow (posting wise) for the next couple of weeks because the semester is coming to an end and my mom is flying down from India next week to spend some time with her ‘favorite’ son.

I’ve returned to the Asides or should I say, quick links section on this blog. However, this time I am using the particularly resilient and flexible Del.icio.us features to do the job for me. I use del.icio.us regularly to bookmark my ‘clicked links’ from the web so why not use that to share them with you. The five most recent links will be displayed on the front page right at the top of the blog (before the main content). Feed readers, you might want to click through to the home page and check it out. You can’t miss it. You can subscribe to its separate feed to get future updates. Not all my bookmarks will be shared but don’t worry, I am sharing at least 75% of the links I bookmark.

I have modified the front page to display only 4 recent posts primarily to reduce load time. The Website Speed Test tells me that this blog loads in 1.4 seconds, which is quite good. Anything more than 4 seconds and you might want to work on your site too or risk losing visitors.

I have added couple of features for the readers. At the bottom of each post, you’ll see two links – Share This and Sphere: Related Content. Share This lets you send the specified post to anyone via email or lets you post it on the various social networking site. I like this feature because it is less instrusive as the other WP-Sociable plugin. Not that I am expecting heavy use of this feature but it is nice to share stuff that you like with your friends. That’s what Web 2.0 is about, right? Sphere, on the other hand does the (kinda) opposite. It shows you posts elsewhere in the blogosphere that are related to the post in question.

Regarding advertising on this blog, apart from Adsense I am using Amazon Context-Link and Kontera; both of which serve text-related ads within the content. Some may find it a bit distracting and upon request, I have changed the color for the Amazon ads and have requested Kontera Support to serve only five ads per page. Just so you know, the Kontera Ads are blue double-underlined links and the Amazon ads are dark red dotted underlined. Other advertising (Chitika, Text Link Ads, and Vizu Answers) served is on the sidebar and below the posts so they shouldn’t be too intrusive. The Vizu Answers is more content and less advertisment. It features polls on different aspects so please feel free to participate.

I’ll have some interesting blogging-related content up soon over the weekend.