Captain's Quarters -

Captain,

I never use any of that stuff. I come here daily to read through your articles, and occasionally leave a comment. I have no use for any of the other tags & gizzies.

Respects,

Ditto with Gwedd. BTW, the page is actually unreadable until it loads completely, at least here at work with IE6. It looks like barcode if I attempt to scroll down until the loading completes.

Social bookmarks (technor, digg, delic, etc) are entities unto themselves. Small fish, like me, find them useful. Big fish are simply feeding the trolls.

At one time, a useful tool for site operators to promote their intellectual property, but now nothing more than parasite sites with their own traffic and community of regulars.

Sitemeter is an all round better tool: more useful information - less bandwidth loss.

I don't use them either. They are just part of the scenery.

Joanie in Carlsbad

Honestly, the sphere and digg tags etc are real estate wasters in my opinion. I use Firefox and with No Script and Adblock I never see them anyway. Since the browser never tries to load those things they don't slow things down. And yes, I do end up blocking most of the blog ads as well. If it blinks, flashes, or rotates etc it gets blocked. I don't find those kind of ads attractive (quite the opposite) but if an ad is just a steady pic I won't bother to block it.

They are all a waste of time and energy, both for blogger and bloggee. All we all need are comments at bottom.

I like sphere a lot, don't care for digg at all, and can take or leave technoratti.

I tried Digging an article recently, and it was a PITA, a real time-waster. That was the first and last one.

But PLEASE enable Print and e-Mail functions!

/Mr Lynn

I have never bothered to click any of those tags on any site.

Are they actually good for anything?

I don't understand the point of anything except Digg which I thought was a good idea until the trolls took over. I read your blog because of what you write and I have come to "know" you and the Mrs. I would not be here otherwise.

I've seen such tags at other sites, but CQ is peculiarly slow and gradual. I just viewed the source textfile, and it's around 277KB. That's a lot, but not an awful lot. Maybe some of the other files which the computer has to load.

The Fighting Keyboardists logo is over 50KB, which is a LOT more than needed for an image of that size. You need a new version of that image, 10KB max.

Some of the html might possibly be written more economically, but I don't know how much filesize reduction you'd get out of it.

I've developed the habit of clicking on "Stop" in my browser after the posts have loaded.

Digg and Sphere were kinda neat at first, but then, as with anything like it online, the scammers learned how to manipulate them and they became cumbersome and useless to people like me. I'm with Faith1: I downloaded Firefox just to be able to bypass all that stuff so that I could enjoy your site trouble free, Captain.

I just saved the Fighting Keyboardists' logo then brought it into PowerPoint, saved it as a gif, and it came to the same 100x104 pixels but only around 7KB.

I just saved the Captain's Quarters logo jpg (55KB, 654x251 px), brought it into PowerPoint, saved it as a bitmap, brought that into PowerPoint, and saved that as a new jpg. Filesize now: 25KB, 654x251px. Looks the same on my screen.

never touch the stuff..........

It's Friday evening and I'm still downloading barcode. I have no idea what Digg or Technorati are. I do enjoy your blog. Keep up the good work...at a faster pace, I hope.

I suppose I'm just part of the crowd -- I sampled the tags, but nothing more than that.

I have my own network of blogs I visit, and they have their own network that they link to [eventually, anway] in their writing. My time is worth something -- I can trust the bloggers I read to make solid recommendations. And so the network grows.

As for this site loading, my experience seems to be a bit different. The content loads quickly as ever. The last few days, it's after I start reading that I notice the page is still loading. Like someone mentioned, I'm getting used to clicking 'stop'.

What are "tags," again?

The "stop" button is the only thing that makes the little hourglass go away.

I sometimes fill out Technorati tags for my own blog, but I have yet to see the point or any results. I haven't "dug" anything since the '60s. The only thing I have to Sphere is Sphere itself.

I don't use the tags at all - on any site. The biggest frustration for me is that on posts w/ a lot of comments I have to wait for all the comments to download before I start scrolling, otherwise I get bounced back to the top of the comments and have to start over.

Personally I come here for the posts & comments. The rest is just chewin' up bandwidth.

Skip the tags. I'm here for the commentary- not the doodads, gewgaws, and webthingies.

Exit polling question: How many feel that the Technorati, Digg, and Sphere tags add to their CQ experience?

Don't follow them at all. Just read the posts and comments.

I append my firewalls and proxies to filter slow loading links/tags/images on an ad hoc basis. Technorati got filtered months ago and I can't say I ever followed one of its links off CQ.

This may apply to CQ! Hat tip to Instapundit.

From Tim Worstall, April 14, 2007, "BlogAds Code Lesson":

Make sure you have expunged from your template the old BlogAds code (proxy.blogads stuff). As of a couple of days ago that's been making sites run extremely slowly. Getting shot of it brings them back up to normal speed.

Of course, BlogAds did tell us to do this some months ago but then who ever listens to experts, eh?