Blogroll

Why the 1389 Blog blogroll no longer appears on the main page:

From 2007 through most of 2011, our blogrolls were visible on our main page at 1389 Blog. At that time, we felt that we could get away with the performance penalty, because the blogrolls were fairly short, and most of them were processed externally by the now-defunct BlogRolling online service.

Even then, we got occasional complaints from impatient readers who got bored waiting for our blog to load.

When BlogRolling went offline in 2010, we converted our blogrolls to WordPress link lists. From then on, all of our links have been stored on 1389 Blog’s server space. We already had roughly a thousand links at that time, and the number has grown since then. The upside was that we gained complete control over our links; the downside was that links could no longer be shared easily with other blogs, and each additional link increased the load on our server processing and bandwidth.

Our readership grew considerably during 2011, increasing the load on server resources and causing frequent server timeout errors and overall slow performance. We admit that it took us awhile to figure out what was happening.

Timeout errors gave rise to many complaints (including some angry ones) from readers and team members unable to access 1389 Blog. Obviously, we were losing viewership on days when frequent timeout errors took place.

Those performance issues necessitated two server upgrades in September, 2011 and December, 2011. In addition, we purchased the Thesis WordPress theme, which loads faster, and installed the WidgetLogic plug-in, which allowed us to move the sidebar content with the link lists to a separate blogroll page.

We regret that it is not possible to provide acceptable page load speeds while keeping all of our links and other resources on the main page. We hope that you will understand!