Strange Things are Afoot at the Circle K

So, we had some downtime overnight, not sure anyone noticed.

Rich and I decided to make a couple tweaks to make the blog load faster. I removed Google Friend Connect, which didn’t seem to do much beyond create a static network with some infrequent discussion. I expect future changes to GFC that might be interesting, so it may make a return later.

Plus, it was causing IE6 to explode, last I checked. So, that’s not good, and even though we’re generally anti-IE6, I know some of you must use it at work.

I also removed Panels, an experiment that yielded no feedback, positive or negative.

Taking away those two has increased decreased (thanks Joonas) load times quite a bit, so that’s good. Those of you reading by RSS and FriendFeed won’t care, but you should be happy with the recent FeedBurner implementation of PubSubHubbub.

Everybody wins.

Rich pointed me to Twitter’s new search widget that I tinkered with a bit. Making it look right requires some CSS hacking that I’m not willing to do right now, but if you really really want it, find the comments. I’m not sure there’s enough discussion about our humble little team to populate that widget with enough content, but I’m open to thoughts. I’m also not in love with the idea that its content depends on Twitter’s uptime, which has returned to near-mid-2008 flakiness lately.

Anyway, just FYI. If you care, find the comments. If not, as you were.

Almost forgot, Disqus restyled their admin interface, and the comment widget on single post pages isn’t picking up some avatars. Seems like it’s their issue, but if not, I’ll get that sorted soon too.

Update: It looks like my Disqus profile lost its picture. So maybe they’ve (temorarily?) lost profile avatars uploaded directly to Disqus. Looks like they retooled the profile settings to support avatars from other login mechanisms, like Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, which would explain why some avatars are fine.

Another update: This post from TechCrunch explains the changes to Disqus well.