Really Slow Sidebar Loading

In the section for “Great Sites”, you have a number of lines that are bracketed with <li> and </li>. Groups of such list lines need to be themselves bracketed with <ul> and </ul> (for unordered lists) or <ol> and </ol> (ordered lists). For example:

<ul>
<li>item one</li>
<li>item two</li>
</ul>

Also, it looks like most of your image links to outside sites get their images from those sites. Depending on the load for those servers, you may see delays in downloading and displaying their images. To speed that up, copy the images to your own server and change your <img src=... to reference your local copy.

Change all <br/> to <br />.

In places where you do have <ul> followed by stuff, then </ul>, you often have other html tags, such as <p> and <center> mixed in. This is a no-no.

If your sidebar were mine, I’d start over. Pull everything out, then add sections in one by one, making sure it validates each time. Your front page runs to over 5000 lines (as of tonight), by the time all the javascript and frames and yaddayadda finishes loading. I’m not surprised you’re seeing slow loads sometimes.

PetLvr: I’d stick some of the doggy pictures behind <!--more--> tags, because the sheer volume of graphics is your biggest problem for load time. Especially the “My Parents Have a New Puppy Dog” post which is just out of control with photos. Pick one and put the rest behind the cut.

An alternative would be to lower the number of posts that you show on the front page. In fact, you have so many posts showing on the front page that even aside from the graphics that’s a part of your problem.