Ubersoft.net: Technology Is Not Your Friend

An Unwilling Return To Normalcy

Christopher Wright — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:25:25 -0500

Unwanted Side Effect

Christopher Wright — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:57:46 -0500

A Common Thread

Christopher Wright — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:21:15 -0500

The Good Cop Couldn't Make It

Christopher Wright — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:11:11 -0500

Site News: Editorializing On Fleen

Christopher Wright — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:49:57 -0500

I don't usually talk about webcomics. I've been drawn into "web comics drama" in the past, usually when I was on Keenspot and someone was slagging Keenspot over some issue I considered terminally stupid, but by and large I don't decide "today I'm going to talk about webcomics" and post webcomic-derived screeds on my website.

Today I break from that non-tradition by talking about webcomics on Fleen. Now that I can see it in print I wish I'd edited it a little better, but since it started out as an off-the-cuff email I think it works well enough.

Updated: I've changed the category of this post because apparently setting it to "Miscellaneous" caused it to break the RSS feed. I hadn't actually intended this to be included in the RSS feed, but since it seems to have gone in anyway I guess I need to make sure the feed doesn't break.

Site News: Site Size Trends And The Bloating Of Ubersoft.net

Christopher Wright — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:57:37 -0500

Slashdot has a story about how Websiteoptimization.com is reporting that web page sizes have trippled in size between 2003 and 2008.

Here is what they're reporting:

2003 sizes: 93.7K

2008 sizes: 312K

Out of curiosity I used their site analyzer to see how Ubersoft.net measured up:

375K

... that's not good.

Here's a more granular breakdown:

html: 6.3K
images: 306.84 K
(images from banner advertisements: 130.14K)
(images from css: 2.63K)
javascript: 35.5K
Google Analytics: 6.28K (this is probably part of the javascript calculation)
CSS: 26.84K

This is... ridiculous. Obviously I need to find a way to slim the site down -- I had no idea it was that bad and it's got to be killing people on modems to try to load the front page. Drupal is rather hefty, however, and it's going to take me some time to figure out how to trim the fat.

Obviously I could stop running banner ads and save 130K right off the bat. That has a few other problems associated with it, however.

A Lesson Learned Too Late

Christopher Wright — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 07:22:56 -0500

Making The Rounds

Christopher Wright — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:13:51 -0500

Possibly Incriminating

Christopher Wright — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:01:35 -0500

Site News: Archives Transcription Complete!

Christopher Wright — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:13:56 -0500

Still no comic today (but look back here tomorrow) but I did want to announce that all comics on this site have now been completely transcribed, and the site has been re-indexed. That means the comics are now searchable.

This was a huge undertaking and once again I want to thank all you readers who helped.