Yes, yes. The latest Stolen Pixels went up yesterday. I know. Real life (insomnia) intruded on my blog-time and I wasn’t able to tend to the site.
Still, I link it here for the sake of completeness. Someone asked why I bother with these posts, since RSS readers can get you to the comic just as well. Well, not everyone uses RSS readers. (And some of those people are my mother.) Also, I know some people depend on these direct links to the comic because they have trouble loading the front page at The Escapist. And finally, these posts serve as a nice place to put up some commentary that wouldn’t really fit anywhere else. (For example: The rest of this post.)
And speaking of the slow-loading difficulties at The Escapist: One of the admins for the site stopped by and left comments here and here, which gives some interesting details on the technical difficulties of webserver load-balancing. Some people say the site is fine, others say it takes a minute to load the front page. It’s apparently a problem with the DNS… whachido routing thingbob. It’s like, complicated and stuff? I dunno.
In my own experience, the site loads at about the same speed as IGN, Gamespot, et al. That is to say, not with any great degree of alacrity. Incomprehensible routing issues aside, there is a lot of stuff on the front page and it takes the browser a while to pull down those assets and put them together, even with a high speed connection.
Having said that, I think it’s all there for a reason. There is simply a tremendous supply of varying content on these sorts of sites. Different groups of visitors each have different things on the site that interest them, and the front page needs to present all that stuff somehow.
Any of us can name a dozen things we’d like to see removed from the front page to streamline the thing. But one person’s clutter is another person’s reason for coming to the site. I’m very glad they have me making funnies and not trying to bring order to the tumbling avalanche of information and entertainment that must somehow fit on that front page. I think I’d go mad. I’m much happier contributing to the problem than working on the solution.
Are you still reading this drivel? You’re supposed to be reading and commenting on my comic, remember? Sheesh. You get distracted so easily. Just so you don’t lose your way again, here is one last link to it. No wait – I lied. Here’s one more.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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