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Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Death of a Blog Roll (and other tweaks)

Yep, today we are nuking a blog roll.

Yikes!

I'm trying to speed up Tavern load time and killing the second blog roll is one way to do so.

So, "Good Reads" will be gone shortly. The "Patreon Backers Blog Roll" is staying. Having the two repeated a large number of blogs and with the addition of The Common Room Forum and the Blog Forum located therein I think we'll still have fairly good coverage of the various gaming blogs.

I've also received a singular request to check The Tavern's RSS feed. It does appear that I had changed to setting from "full post" to "short." I'm going to change that to "page break." I RARELY have used page breaks in the past but again, in an effort to speed up load times, I'll be using page breaks in the future for longer (or heavy art posts) as well as some of the gaming content posts. So, few will notice any difference, the blog should load quicker and most posts will still fully load in the various feed readers in full.

Did I mention The Tavern's Facebook Community surpassed 300 members earlier this morning? Or that three new backers are supporting The Tavern via Patreon since this past weekend? I feel all warm and fuzzy :)




9 comments:

  1. Sad ... For selfish reasons as a good chunk of my traffic comes through that blog rol.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My apologies Josh. It may return in a limited form in the future, but I'm trying to make tweaks for page loading reason and this is one.

      In many ways it was redundant. If I figure a way to do drop down tabs it may return in a new form sooner than later.

      Delete
    2. No need to apologize Erik, it makes sense and helps get people to one of the best oar blogs quicker. I may be sad but I am for it.

      Delete
  2. On the first path, your page loaded quite quickly.

    I did like the Good Reads section, as it took me to blogs I might have otherwise missed. No worries though. They're all bookmarked now anyways.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I never experienced any problems with page loading, and I really found the Good Reads tremendously useful to catch up on interesting posts at a glance. I think it would be great if you could reinstate it as a drop down. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'll mourn its passing. The good reads section has always been a very useful section of the site - it took me to lots of other blogs, or highlighted possible articles of interest in blogs I don't usually follow. When I started my blog I felt it almost an obligation to include one myself. The "pay for a link" blog roll is a bit tacky.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Patreon Blog Roll has been present for over a year and this is the first time of heard concern expressed over it. I do understand where you are coming from but the truth is the majority of blogs on the old blog roll were dead or dying. You only saw the handful of the more active. There were over 140 blogs in the old Roll and it was slowing down the load of the page.

      For now, we have The Patreon Blog Roll, The Blog Forum in the Common Room where bloggers can list their own blogs as well as a mid-week highlight post of some of the more valuable posts (in my opinion) from Old School Gaming from the previous week.

      I'm working on turning the TABS under the header into drop down menus. When I do, there will be a drop down listing of Old School blogs that shouldnt effect load time. I may be ambitious and try to get drop downs with sub-drop downs, so they could be grouped where applicable. A man with time on his hands is a dangerous thing...

      The Tavern is going through a spring cleaning of sorts. There have been (and will be) some changes.

      I do appreciate all of the feedback.

      Delete

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