Hello, one of my pages (possibly more) belongs to a Bravenet Sitering. That page loads much slower than most other pages on my site of equivalent size, and near as I can figure it part of the delay is from all the requests for the "next" and "previous" and "join" (and so on) images of navigation buttons for the Sitering code that are hosted on bravenet servers.

Can I copy those images to my own server and link to them so the page will load faster? Do I need permission from both the Sitering owner and bravenet, just the owner, or just bravenet? The page in question is the one listed as my Website URL in this post.

Browser: Firefox

OS: Windows XP (for now, new computer coming with Windows 7)

the page with the webring loaded fine for me and so did the links

you could have something with a point with many visitors on your site so could make your page load slow or something


Maybe in time will settle when you get the new computer

I'm not saying it doesn't load, but it takes three times longer to load than other pages of my site that are about the same size and get about the same number of visitors (I use analytics tools to check my web traffic).

I checked and it seems the navigation button images hosted on the bravenet server are not unique to this one sitering but are used by some other bravenet siterings too. I'm hoping for permission to host copies of the images on my web site to cut down the number of separate requests being made when a visitor first views the page. Who do I ask? I'm trying to contact Bravenet but didn't see any contact email whose subject area matched this question.

At the very least, I will update the supplied Bravenet sitering HTML code (tables for layout, so 1990s) to HTML 4.01 Strict coding.

You had no heart burn about rewriting the code to eliminate the tables, yet you have still have an issue with the button images. That doesn't make sense.

At first, I didn't notice that you had two web rings on your site. My ad blocker, in Firefox, would not let the buttons display, and it didn't leave around any "alt" text, so I would know it existed. The "div" with the links and buttons was collapsed to zero height. Once I disabled the ad blocker, they displayed correctly. And, of course, IE displayed them just fine.

Hosting the button images on your own site will probably get around the Firefox ad block issue. I doubt that Bravenet really cares where you host them. And, in the end, it doesn't matter whether it comes directly from your site or theirs. And if they do complain, make your own buttons, and replace them in the code. They are just images and you rewrote the code anyway.

However, I doubt hosting them yourself will fix any other problems. I would think that the slowdown would be more due to the PHP scripting behind the button. Every time someone hits a button, the server has to do a data base look up to verify you have a site ring, and then process the operation. You can easily see if the button images are causing the problem by replacing them with text links. Take the images out of the picture and see if the slow down still exists. Then see what your analytics says about the issue.

You say that as if tables are bad to use and will eventually go away. They are far too useful to ever go away.

There is nothing wrong with using tables. If you read the PHP code for the "webring.com" web ring, you would see that it also uses a table. And, HTML 4.01 Strict coding does not preclude using tables. HTML 4.01 Strict coding can contain all HTML elements and attributes, except for presentational or deprecated elements (like font). Also, Framesets are not allowed. So, as long as you keep away from a couple of depreciated table elements, like "align" and "bgcolor", all of the other optional, standard, and event attributes are supported under HTML 4.01 Strict. Don't rewrite, just for the sake of rewriting.

Browser: Firefox

OS: Solaris, Redhat, Fedora, Suse