Wetlook World Forum

Message # 27690.3.1.1.1.1.2

Subject: Re: Banners

Date: Tue 27/02/07 11:03:36 GMT

Name: leonmoomin

Email: leon@mostwet.com

Website:

By Telcontar - mrnemesis@ntlworld.com Tue 27/02/07 09:32:46 GMT

Website:

By leonmoomin - leon@mostwet.com Tue 27/02/07 05:47:07 GMT

Website:

But obviously said much better!

leonmoomin

By EuroWAM TEAM - webmaster@heelsnlegs.com Mon 26/02/07 20:25:05 GMT

Website: www.mostwet.com

It's like you come into the man's house and tell him that he should change the paintings on the walls in front of all this friends to a party...

BTW Congratulations for redesigning the wetinred.com. Good luck with the site!

Regards,

EuroWAM TEAM

By Telcontar - mrnemesis@ntlworld.com Mon 26/02/07 12:57:57 GMT

Website:

Read my own damn post -- had you bothered, you'd realise that I was placing the same scrutiny on the WetInRed links page as your own forum.

In fact, if you actually stop and think for a second about what you're saying, or read the other responses, you'd discover a fresh problem. You care about the precious banners? Who wants to sit and wait for them to load? If you personally feel that my judgement on the slowdown is in error, you're free to disagree with me politely of course.

In case it's not apparent (it may not be) I also have an extensive personal site full of all manner of things I've posted to share with the Internet as a whole, to entertain, amuse, help out and provide a service -- this has been around since 2000. So I've come to learn, over the years, all manner of things that can go wrong on sites, and what needs to be fixed. I consider the job of a Webmaster seriously. I have to tend to my own site, of course -- I'm one of those people who's actually sad, or responsible enough to study the 404 log now and then trying to find where I've gone wrong (it's hard work, since most 404s are rubbish put there by broken bots).

Right now, you'd only bitch at me again if I said anything, but I am still meaning to tell you that you need to get HTML entity handling sorted out, because your site breaks posts in foreign languages where the character set is outside of Windows Latin-1.

I don't report problems with the site because I hate you or this site, or because I hate wetlook, but because it's the DUTY of a netizen to report site problems. I can't believe how many problems on my own site go unnoticed for months, maybe years -- things I didn't catch that no-one noticed. My contact page has not accepted addresses with digits in for ages. I didn't realise this until someone (thankfully) reported the same problem with the WetInRed contact page, which used the same broken code.

I am not perfect, my site has faults. So does yours. I imagine, so do most. And clearly you're failing as an admin to find them and fix them, so someone has to report them.

Yes, bug reporting is a depressing job at times, as you fear that people like you will throw a strop. I personally get angry when people report bugs in my own software, but I don't respond in anger because I realise that they're blameless and that I'm only angry at my own failings to write software that works properly.

Incidentally, Firefox is full of bugs too.

By Nigel - nigel@wetlook.com Mon 26/02/07 11:02:32 GMT

Website: www.wetlook.com

for this particular 'criticism' of yours:

1 - the money paid by the banner owners pays for this forum to be maintained

2 - most banner owners want them to be loaded from their site, so that

 a) they can directly compare the page loads with their click thru's

 b) they can update their contents any time they want

3 - it is down to the banner owner what the format is, I have told everyone that they are displayed at 150x30, if you feel the need to complain (which has always been a desire of yours) it is them who you should be complaining to.

I've no idea what browser you are using, but any decent one does not halt the display of the html while the images are loading. I mostly use Firefox, and it renders the whole page (normally in less that 1 second), then the banners and other images load up as they come in. May be you CPU or system is not up to much ?

If you have so much spare time that you have bothered to investigate the size of the banners, then may be it would be better used in sorting out the websites that you are supposed to be running, rather than going around criticising everyone else's ?

All the emails I have had from you over the years have been niggley little complaints. If you don't like the way this forum is run or appears, then go elsewhere, there are plenty of other forums.

Most people come here to get wetlook content, you seem to come here to pick little holes in the site ? You appear more interested in minor layout and visual aspects of the forum than in wetlook. All you seem to do is complain, and advertise the websites that you run, or more often apologising for them not running - thank you so much for your contribution.

Nigel

By Telcontar - mrnemesis@ntlworld.com Sun 25/02/07 23:31:00 GMT

Website:

Right now, at the bottom, I see these two:

Into the Water dedicated 150x30 banner, 2 k.

Jeans and Pants 468x60 banner -- shrunk by the HTML -- 34 k!

Think about the modem load time for 34 k of data (8 seconds at 4 k/sec) to load a tiny banner that could be as low as 2 k (0.5 sec) if it was scaled and optimised at the source.

Worse, by placing every image on a different server, you can't take any advantage of pipelining or keep-alive. Even requests to ask "has this image changed?" (standard If-Modified-Since conditional GET) require a separate three-way handshake to a new server and can't be chained via keep-alive.

Finally, the browser has to reduce every image to fit into all the slots.

This has to be the slowest-loading site I've ever seen, mostly from waiting for all the HTML to come in, but for people who surf in privacy mode (clear cache on exit), on dial-up etc, you could do a lot to help them by cleaning up the banner situation.

Ideally, you'd host them all on your own site to reduce the number of TCP connections and DNS lookups needed, but even if not, you could still improve it by ensuring that the various sites supply sensible images, scaled and cropped to fit.

The WetInRed site hosted its own copies of all the banners for the Links page, with this same flaw. It came to 500 k of banner images! (Imagine that on a modem ...) From scaling and roughly optimising them all I took 100 k or more off the total. 400 k is still a lot, but these are larger banners on Steve's site -- 468 px wide generally. Personally I prefer plain text for links in the first place, but maybe those on his page need reducing also? With reduced size comes reduced clarity and reduced impact ... Not sure what to do about that one.