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.

Fri 13th - 2

I'm now also reading L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz via RSS from DailyLit. There are 51 instalments, and the first starts with the author's introduction - he says the book "aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out".

The story's first paragraph:

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cookstove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar--except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole.

Fri 13th - 1

Yesterday while mowing I had the sudden thought that by now I should have read Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Ages ago I downloaded the ebook from Project Gutenberg, but my enthusiasm dropped off after about 20 minutes and later I just forgot to go back and start reading again.

In other words, I still haven't read Moby Dick.

This isn't a huge problem as far as world problems go. And anyway, I decided this year that if I don't like a book in the first 50 pages I'll just stop reading it. Life's too short.

And in fact life is too short for me to keep dithering about how to write this blog post, too. (I've been floundering around here for half an hour.) Does it matter why I've decided to read Moby Dick through DailyLit? No.

In summary: DailyLit - allows you to read books by instalment via RSS (feed reader) or email. Each instalment takes an average reader less than 5 minutes to read, and if you want more instalments, you can get them. It looks like many or most of the books are free, and there's a large range of categories.

I'm trying it. Moby Dick in 260 parts, starting like this:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.