Tempo

I have tons of stuff to get to you, but since I am on dial-up, I am just not able to do everything I am used to doing. I know I have only had high-speed for about six months or so, but I used to work for a broadband company, so it's not the first time I've had it.

In general, I have always striven for Minimalism, and not just for aesthetic reasons. This comes from the BBS days, specifically because I had a 2400-baud modem for years after everyone else had 14.4-28.8 and up! Indeed, The Weirding was the only BBS I know of that ran from a 2400-baud modem when basically everyone had faster equipment. Needless to say, it was never very successful.

But it was damn good... just too bad so few ever knew it.

Still, I always kept the tricks and lessons I learned from that experience in mind, and this became a real sticking-point for me during the Dot-Com Boom, as site after bloated site locked-up my (and customers') boxes, took literally 5-10 minutes to load, and had all sorts of pointless Flash animation, graphics, and so forth. That cemented the concept for me and I have clung to it ever since.

However, it's really hard to run a blog/website/whatever dedicated to art in any form when you are constantly having to worry about the size of graphics and the like. You probably can't tell it, but many of the graphics on the site took hours - even days! - to work, because I was absolutely determined to make sure everything loaded quickly and was easily-accessible to visitors with low-speed access.

Especially since I was one of them!

However - you know - it is what it is, guys, and I am kinda glad I have the next week to remember what it's like to have a dial-up connection, because I maintained that I would not alienate the tons of you who have dial-up access.

However, I've been using it since this afternoon and The Rundown loads fairly fast. Granted, the whole thing takes some time, but since this is a blog and the thrust of the content is textual, the entries load fast enough that you don't have to wait to start reading content. The graphics and ads keep the icons spinning for a while, but by the time you've read whatever it is that attracted you in the first place, they're either in-place or you've moved on to whatever else you're interested in.

So, I'm pleased with the performance. If any of you have anything you'd like to add, I'm certainly interested to hear it! But, unless I can be shown otherwise, I think we've got a decent thing going here. Unfortunately, as the guy who runs it, I need the fast access in order to do research and the like - simple, but crucial, processes which can take hours on dial-up. So, we're going to have to work with what we have and hope for the best.

Just be patient; we'll be back to the regular frenetic - freneticism? - in about a week.

© C Harris Lynn, 2008