Titles

I haven't found a way to avoid writing titles here in Blogger. And I really hate writing titles. Yes, yes, obviously: "What's the big deal? Just call it something, fool!" But there's something about having to sum up a post in a title that turns it into something other than I want it to be. Sometimes I just want to write a long Twitter - not "A Post About Something", but just me saying whatever-not-much.

But Blogger uses a title as the page address, so if you don't provide a title yourself, it snags the first words from your post and uses them instead - which looks stupid in the archives. And my former method of using date and number (eg. 15Jul08-1) now looks stupid in Swurl.

So that's it, you see? Whatever I do it's going to look stupid.

It's nice to have that going for me, yes.

Harvey 1 - 1

Harvey 1 died yesterday. He was a little bull, only the size of a big calf, and years ago (5, 6, 7, 10? I can't remember) I raised him from birth after his mother died, feeding him with a bottle every day, and then later, when he was older and wouldn't take to feed right away, he got to eat nice neat little squares of cold solid rolled oats (which he loved).

He'd been looking a bit listless over the last week, but not enough to worry about. But then yesterday morning he was lying on his side, all four legs stuck straight out along the ground, and he couldn't get up. Cutting to the chase, he got worse during the day and I called a vet and Harvey got a needle of something (anaesthetic, I think?) into his neck and was dead in seconds.

It's not that I'm trying to understand it - there's nothing to understand: he was sick, now he's dead. And I'm not upset - the decision to kill him was not hard: he was suffering, now he's not. It was his suffering that was hard, not his death; or, it was watching his suffering and being unable to do anything about it that was hard, and as soon as he died that was over.

Needless to say, all of it was hard for Harvey. I keep forgetting it was actually about him, not me. If only cattle had blogs.

Anyway, I might write about this in instalments. There are so many big things in it and I don't want to struggle over trying to turn them into something that all fits together. I don't know though; I can't decide whether I want to write about anything at all. Maybe just saying this much will have been enough. It feels like I've had too much to eat and can't digest things, if you know what I mean, and this has been an attempt to chew more thoroughly.

Sat 14th - 2

I've been trying to reduce the page-loading time for this blog but so far haven't had much success. Some site somewhere said that ideally page-size should be under 200K, but this page is over that and presumably for anyone with a slower connection it will take ages to load. I tried reducing the number of widgets, reducing the number of posts, reducing the size of images, and all of that helped a bit - but not enough to make much difference, so I put them all back again.

The biggest size-hogs are not images but JavaScript files. Here is a list of my pages ranked in size (K) from largest to smallest, total size first and JavaScript size second.

Flickr .... 1058 .... 533
Twitter .... 341 .... 248
Blogger .... 248 .... 158
CiteULike .... 245 .... 146
LibraryThing .... 191 .... 133
del.icio.us .... 143 .... 63

If you're interested in page size/load time and you use the Firefox browser, two add-ons are useful:

Firebug

YSlow

YSlow does the size checking but it's an extension of Firebug and won't work on its own, so you need to have Firebug installed too.