Optimizing Go Blogs vs Overloading Feeds

Written by alejo on February 6th, 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.

Permalink

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Go Related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

8 Comments to “Optimizing Go Blogs vs Overloading Feeds”

Posted by Louis, February 6th, 2008 at 3:30 pm

Yea, I second that Google Reader rocks. RSS Readers have changed the way I view the web.

I’d say about 80% of my surfing the web is via an RSS Reader.

You’d also be surprised just how much of the web nowadays has RSS feeds. Its not at all limited to only blogs. I’ve also got craigslist, forums, news sites, etc.

Posted by Nexik, February 6th, 2008 at 6:20 pm

today the use of modem is marginal, but of course bandwidth is always issue. That is why i change way of showing posts on my side (on homepage only posts from last day).

Optimizing the site is good but recently you don’t need to care too much about it.

about RSS: good rss reader download only header of any new feed and only when you are interested then it download the rest.

Posted by thrashor, February 6th, 2008 at 8:57 pm

If bandwidth is a concern, you can just read the few best Go blogs, including this one, via the Go Aggregator’s feeds (http://goaggregator.blogspot.com/). Most of the blogs at PlanetGo – which is a great site – are unfortunately inactive.

Posted by Alejo, February 7th, 2008 at 3:30 pm

Yes!!! I totally support your idea!! If you only want to check a few blogs, GoAggregator is a good place to go.

By the way, Sol.ch is doing a nice job in his blog. And there is one from a korean pro too…

Posted by Alejo, February 7th, 2008 at 3:48 pm

Well, I don’t think modem connections are “that marginal”. I’m just checking google analytics stats and it seems I receive about a 10% of dialup connections.
I know it’s not much, but I think that having a site which weights around 200k makes it visible for them. A page which takes a few minutes to load, won’t load on internet explorer. Back in my memory, I remember the times when I used to have my ***** modem connection and decided to disable images on my explorer. If I wanted to surf comfortably, I had to disable them, otherwise most pages wouldn’t load or it would take them ages to do so.

In fact, I’ve checked your blog (nothing personal, though) and I’ve seen you only have one post on your homepage (which you already mentioned, and I think it’s a good idea if your regular posts weight quite a lot), but on the next page there are a bunch of unoptimized images.
For example, the board images you are showing us, though helpful, weight around 200k each; and I counted over 20 of them…
Personally it’s not a problem for me, but your site might be “un-visitable” for a user without broadband connection.
I think you are using panda-glgo for making the diagrams. Switching the graphics to 2-colour and disabling board textures will reduce the image size considerably.

Posted by Alejo, February 8th, 2008 at 2:47 pm

Just a small sample, the new image at my next post “discovering go books: tesuji”. It’s 285x311px, and it’s 3.91KB.
Your board images at 320×320, occupy 200KB.
I hope you see my point.

Posted by Nexik, February 8th, 2008 at 5:44 pm

yes I change software and now I using gowrite2. New look you can see here http://badukschool.blogspot.com/search/label/zhou%20ruiyang old size: 334 kb new size: 7.62 KB but of course changing all diagrams on my side will take some times. Thanks for pointing me that gGo are making so huge png

Posted by Alejo, February 10th, 2008 at 9:35 am

Well done! Thanks!!

Don’t worry about changing past diagrams, if people are using feeds (most frequent behaviour) they’ve already read your posts and won’t usually come back to the old posts.

Alejo's Tenuki

A few moments to learn, a lifetime to master