I think I am entitled to give myself a wee pat on the back.

As some of you know, I look after quite a few webbing sites.  Some of them are mine [such as this one], some I host and look after for a pathetically small fee and some are pro bono, such as “Smoking – On Ethics“, “Martin Scriblerus” and of course “Nisakiman” and “The Anna Raccoon Archives“.  It’s hard to believe that a whole year has passed since the panic of restoring Anna Raccoon’s material?

One of the items I keep an eye on in those sites is their speed.  I initially had a target of three seconds.  Every site had to fully load in that time or else I had some serious work to do.  I think my greatest challenge was a site I took over that took around six minutes to load, but I did it [it now takes 0.74 seconds].

Anyhows, they [whoever they are] say that people bugger off if a site takes longer than two seconds, which is an incredibly bad reflection on our oh so impatient society?  So hence my little challenge.  Could I get all my sites to load in that time?

I finally achieved it this week.  It took a lot of tweaking, experimenting and a ton of research but I did it.  My slowest site now is 1.2 seconds and the vast majority are under a second.

“Ah here!” I hear you shout, “Rambles takes fucking ages to load”.  That’s as may be, but that’s not my problem.  Maybe the old Widow Cartwright down your road is hogging the phone line with her malicious gossip?  Maybe your next door neighbour has hacked into your home wifi and is merrily downloading gigabytes of porn?  Maybe your ISP is re-routing all your traffic through CIA’s servers?  There could be loads of reasons but as far as I am concerned, this site is banged out onto the Interweb in 0.96 seconds.

Okay, so all of this is boring, but it’s better than watching “Judge Judy” or listening to Joe Duffy?