Broken Theme and Something In-between
Many of you have probably noticed that my pages load really, really slowly. I've been doing some research on the guts of my system, and I've been able to determine why. Some of it is due to my ignorance, and others go way beyond that.
While doing speed tests this morning, I came across something very interesting. The old theme I was using was really, really heavy on file weight and server load. When I switched away from that theme, my file size went from 60.91KB to 48.29 KB. Yes, my file size is now 21% lighter - just from switching themes. Speed tests were comparable and between 20 and 30 percent faster.
However, after playing around with some other stuff on the blog, I broke some of my widgets and things generally went to hell. I hadn't completed the blog theme I wanted, but I wasn't going back to the old theme - so I compromised and modified an old favorite...the Copyblogger theme.
It is not complete yet, but I wanted to get something workable back up. I'm trying to balance minimalism with navigation at the moment, and the color scheme is supposed to evoke an old woodsy, earthy theme - imagine an old forest that's thriving with old and new life. It's a work in progress, but it at least works without bloating my file size.
Please check it out and let me know what you think. I'm particularly concerned about ease of reading - if I've broken functionality for aesthetics, please let me know so I can fix it. Also, the color scheme is meant to calm, focus, and refresh - if it depresses and frustrates, let me know.
As for the other things that cause this blog to be so slow, I'll be fixing what I can and will document it after the fix. I'll quickly say this-if you've been looking at a good domain host for your blog, avoid Dreamhost's shared service. I'm in the market for a new host, though I don't at all want to have to make yet another move. <Sigh>