Two behind the scenes upgrades were made to this blog. Apparently, my fiddling with the news feeds for this page took a toll for user access. Everytime this page was loaded by a new visitor, the script had to directly access the remote RSS files to display the news headings. The problem with this type of access was that my site's ability to be displayed in a timely manner was dependent on the availability of the remote RSS/RDF files. Well, this was a bad system of handling newsfeeds. I've now resorted to caching the RSS/RDF files every 2 hours and this has improved access time noticeably.
Secondly, I've now resorted to using BlogRolling.com to handle links to fellow bloggers. The service compiles my links and spews out usable code (in my case I'm using a RSS file) for me to use in my blog template. As you can see under "Fellow Bloggers," I've added a few additional sites. Honestly, I'm trying to increase my value at blogshares.com to get listed for trading. We'll see where all this blogshare trading leads -- for all we know, this blogshare service could go by the wayside and be sent to the big blog in the sky.
Posted by johnvu at May 9, 2003 11:43 PMCaching RSS feeds is a great idea for your site's performance but also a lot more polite toward the originator(s) of the feed(s)... Most people use 1 RSS download per hour as the definition of "politeness" for this ;-)
Happy blogging & keep working on tweaking your site!
(if you're looking for more MT tweaks, you can always check out this URL :-)
http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/categories/movable_type/