Netbook Network

It’s been a wonderful year, and we’re growing bigger and bigger, thanks to you! The holidays are a time of giving, and as a special present to those that visit us on a regular basis, we’re giving away copies of the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle as a way of saying thanks and to match with the rather cold temperatures we’ve been experiencing lately! This giveaway will be a unique one – no, not a raffle, but each of the first ten commenters will receive an unopened gift copy of the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle – a set of stellar indie games to play this season!

I’m proud to announce that we’ve launched another site on our… network? That’s right! We have more than just one site now, and this one deviates from the world of netbooks to the world of routers, Internet-enabled devices, and long headaches with your ISP’s tech support. Is My Internet Working does more than tell you that your Internet is indeed working, but aims to be a reference guide to those who need help troubleshooting Internet connection issues.

I’ve been working a bunch behind the scenes to improve one thing lately – site load time. Netbooks are slow enough when it comes to rendering websites, and no one wants to visit a site that takes years to load. After a bunch of tweaking, it’s gotten a lot better now. It used to take me about seven seconds to load the main page, now it’s about four. Here’s a changelog of all the things I can remember doing.

• The flash tag cloud was removed and replaced with a normal tag cloud. Yes, it was pretty, but it also took a while to load and took up a lot of space when the user didn’t have Flash installed.
• All images are now compressed using Smush.It
• Maximum posts per page has been reduced from eight to seven.
• Javascript, HTML and CSS are all compressed using WP Minify. It reduces the amount of site requests and can significantly improve load times.