I’m in a bit of a spot lately regarding this blog. As you probably have experienced, this page takes around ten seconds (average, on my less than 10KB/s connection) to load. Sig9, which is hosted on the same server, manages to chunk out a page in under two seconds. While the Sig9 main page is focused, small and sweet (largely due to Vivek), Vysnu looks and acts like a pig bladder – bloated out of proportion.

So why do I persist with this design? One of the major reasons is that Vysnu is blue. While many other people have white blogs, Vysnu embraces the Grecian Jug, at first mostly because I was so fed up of black on white. But every design also takes a cost in usability and I fear this is getting too unwieldy.

For a few days, I’ve been playing with an alternate, much lighter layout. As you can see, it’s black on white (though it has a few nifty tricks). But I’m stuck between worlds here because I really like the current layout too and it would have been a non-issue had page-load speeds been faster.

So I’m turning to you people, what do you think? Do you think the page-load speeds are bearable? What parts of the site do you rarely use (the kewl links, the categories, the outside links, the archives), what things should I scrap? Should I start over with a newer, faster layout? Tell me any suggestions you have and since I’m going to work on this site anyway, tell me anything that you want added 🙂 to this site.

I’m also pursuing other methods to speed up this site, so if you think something has blazed up suddenly, it isn’t you =)