For those who celebrated the holiday last Monday, I hope you enjoyed your short week. I know I did.

To recap the week:

On Tuesday, Pun Intended was named New Blog Of The Week

Wednesday we discussed how we can use our blogs to benefit others.

And yesterday, we took the blinders off and discussed visiting blogs with opposing ideas/opinions.

For those who didn’t follow the comments, Jennifer’s comment on yesterday’s post reminded me of an important issue.

If we’re visiting another person’s blog, and we disagree with what they’ve written, please show them the same respect you would like to see on your blog. Our blogs are our homes in blogosphere. Treat others as you would like to be treated.

Secondly, as Natural stated, when disagreeing on the content of a post, stick to the issue and do not attack the author. Remember, they’ve provided the information for free, and even though we may not agree with what is written, the author is still a human being.

Behind the scenes I been working on getting my blog load faster.

I’ve removed all plugins I’m not using and also took down my comment counter. I was able to shave nearly a second off of the load time.

While researching how load time affects our visitors, it’s written if our blog is too slow to load, we risk losing visitors/readers.

Anytime we have plugins, widgets, avatars, images, ads, and/or some issues behind the scenes, our load time is put at risk. Ideally we should aim for a load time of under 2 seconds.

To test your own blog’s load time, I’ve found several sites that supply a free service to do so. They are:

1) www.iWebtool.com
2) www.SubmitExpress.com
3) www.WebsiteOptimization.com

Today’s Assignment

To start off this weeks “Open Mic”, I have two questions for all of you.

1) If a blog is slow to load (in your browser), do you click off, continue to visit it, and/or do you remove it from your reader?

2) How often are you performing a “save” (backup) of your blog?

The floor is yours. You know the rules.

Questions, comments and concerns are welcome.

Have Fun!

Keep it Clean!

And don’t forget to either check the “subscribe to comments on this post” box, or subscribe to my comments RSS feed (upper right sidebar), so you can follow along.