Wednesday, February 6. 2008
The more the Go blogosphere grows, the more unread blog posts on the feeds reader. There are several ways to track blog's feed, but today I would like to call your attention to one of them.
Most of you already know about
Planetgo, it's an aggregator of go blogs where you can find around 27 sources of feeds, whose last 70 posts you are forced to load everytime you enter the site. Once you open the site you already start realizing there is something weird about that page. It takes a lot more than usual to surf through it entirely. It loads over 200 images, with a total size over
10 MB. It would take about 25 minutes to load on a 56k modem connection...
I'm not to blame planetgo for this, since it is not only its designer fault, but also the bloggers contribute in it (myself included).
Image optimization is not as widely used as desired: it's nicer to see an image of a board with a "tree texture" painted on the board rather than a plain colour, even if it occupies 10 times more.
From the point of view of a blogger, I'd like to recommend a website which analyses your sites and let's you know some data you may not be aware of:
WebsiteOptimization. There you'll see how much your site weights, how long it takes to load on a modem connection, and some other data which might be interesting. If you see your site's size is unreasonably big, trying checking the size of the images (the biggest source of data), it is very easy to set most go programs to work on a 2 colour basis, therefore reducing amazingly the size of each image. They are not as nice as the ones with shadow effects, but your visitors experience will improve and they may come back more often than they did.
For Blog readers, it would be nice to have their
own feeds reader with your own profile, the feeds-reader would know which posts you've already read and which you haven't, therefore not showing the firsts ones, saving lots of bandwidth and making the experience more comfortable. If you take into account that I receive 2-3 daily posts on my Google Reader, from out of 37 sources... you'll realize that it is quite a good deal of time and bandwidth you are saving this way.
From my point of view one good option is Google Reader, though you may find lots of them through the internet and I'm not to advertise anyone. Anyway, if you are just a casual blog reader and do not keep track of all blogs, but just take a glance once now and then, Planetgo might be suitable for you. If you only want to receive the latest post of the best go blogs available, you can use the Go Aggregator Feeds:
Here, personally I would add
Sol.ch's blog and
this one, made by a korean pro player.
