Not Quite Fixed
One of the things that I noticed when I was investigating the slow page load times a couple of weeks ago was that the server was using a lot more memory that it should have. I’m tired of tweaking configuration settings! So, for the time being, I’ve set the server to restart every night at 4:00 AM EST. Not many people are on the server at that time of night, and the outage/delay is only a few seconds. But I did want to mention it in case you’re visiting from Europe (where it’s already morning), or Australia/New Zeeland (where is early evening). The internet in general and blogging in particular has helped make the world a much smaller place. So, if you’re one of our overseas visitors who is inconvenienced, we aren’t ignoring/haven’t forgotten you. I’m just stumped.
P.S. You may have noticed that we currently show 8 posts on the front page. That seems to provide enough history and, at the same time, allow for reasonable page load speeds.
I do 10 blog posts, but I don’t have big pictures on the front page. I purposely make my pictures small so they load fast. Sometimes the click thrus are big but that’s only one picture.
Try doing 5 blog posts. You put a lot more pictures than I do. 5 should be plenty.
Kate: Your blog always loads almost instantly for us; even when you have photos. We do need to do more editing. Even after cropping and pixilation, images from our new camera tend to be larger than ones we took with our old one. It’s just one more thing to tune. We’re using a new plugin I wrote to provide a variable number of posts on the home page depending on how many we posted in the past week. It will always show at least 5; but may show more if we post more in a seven day period