Hey, thanks for that! I agree that...

Hey, thanks for that! I agree that the site is a bit painful to load over a slow connection. It's actually not the maps that slow it down, but rather the photos on the page that have to load. The map will simply wait until everything else on the page has finished loading, and then do it's thing. Of course, that means it sits there looking slow for a while and therefore gets the blame.

I'll look into ways to improve the appearance of speed on the blog pages. This will probably mean drawing the maps a bit earlier and waiting not bothering to load any photos at the bottom of the page until you actually scroll down to them. I've been meaning to get to this for a while now, so thanks for reminding me!

I'm afraid that the email thing may have to stay like it is though. Unfortunately, blog sites are a big target for spammers these days, so any feature that allows email to be sent to real people is likely to get exploited. Already, we get up to 1000 attempts every day to send mail and add spam comments to our users. So, while it's no fun to have to make an account just to send mail, it's one of the only ways that we can ensure it's human beings and not automated spam robots sending those messages. Sorry about that one!

Jason

written by

Jason Kester on May 11, 2008

Heading South?