I want to apologize to those readers who have been complaining of loading problems with ProBlogger of late. I’ve had a number of issues to deal with and think that I’m slowly identifying the problems.
One of the issues was that i was running Google Analytics on my blog which as an external script seemed to slow things down a little, perhaps in combination with a couple of other external scripts. I’ve stopped using it – not that I was really checking it much anyway as I found it to be too heavy a stats program.
But the main problem seemed to be revolving around AdBrite ads. The loading of pages seemed to intermittently stop when it got to the point where the AdBrite ads should have been showing our b5media ads. It would pause loading while it tried to run them meaning that everything after them in the source code would not load (ie 90% of my blog as my Adbrite ads were in the left hand sidebar – some blogs with the same problem would at least have content showing as they have right hand sidebars). It would then load the rest of the page (sometimes taking up to a few minutes) without the ads which should have shown. I’ve noticed this happening for a week or two but the last few days it’s worsened.
I’ve noticed the same loading problem on my other blogs with Adbrite ads on them also. (update: I’m seeing the same loading issues on lots of blogs with adbrite including Gawker). Has anyone else or is it just some of us? One thought I had was that maybe it’s a browser problem (I’m using Firefox 1.5.0.4) – but the same issue seems to be happening for me with IE and Safari.
I’m not sure what the problem is – I’m seeing the same thing happen on our other b5 blogs today also. It doesn’t happen all of the time but enough to give me and quite a few of you a pain in the neck. If this is happening to every Adbrite publisher today there must be ALOT of blogs not loading properly!
We’ll be looking further into it as Adbrite do bring in a good income to our blogs but in the mean time I’ve removed them temporarily from my sidebar and have contacted Adbrite regarding it.
Update: I’ve just noticed that Isolf.com has the news that Adbrite have announced an upcoming down time of their server while they upgrade in a couple of days time. I’m not sure if this is in connection to these problems.
