I’ve slimmed down the sidebar here on ruk.ca (which you’ll see, of course, only if you’re viewing the site in an actual web browser).

I decided that the upside of having random photos of my current Plazes location wasn’t worth the additional work and bandwidth required to obtain them, and I find removing them creates a calmer visual environment.

I also removed the “latest photos” collection of Flickr thumbnails: I’m not taking many photos these days (it being freezing cold and all), so this wasn’t as relevant as it may have once been. Removing these also removes a site-loading bottleneck, as the sidebar was often slow to load because of the necessity of a connection to Flickr to get the photos (I had planned to modify the code to cache the thumbnails locally, but didn’t get around to it).

Anyone have any thoughts on the “Posts since your last visit” and “Comments since your last visit” sections. They’re certainly not an industry standard blog feature, so perhaps they’re superfluous. Let me know if they help you or not.

Oh, and one more thing: if you’re a regular reader who wants to say “hi” without actually throwing your hat into the conversational fray, you’re welcome to drop a comment into the Who Are You? thread. 114 of you already have, and reading through those comments is an interesting way to get a sense of the otherwise anonymous readership.