extremely long random character strings as search terms in stats
-
You mean make it shorter?
Yes. Every widget you add to the sidebar is additional HTML and CSS code, images, and even JavaScript that needs to be loaded on every page refresh, so have too much stuff in the sidebar can have an impact on page load size, and by extension, time.
Why would a “stippled background” cause issues?
It shouldn’t, normally, but we’re trying to rule out possible causes.
-
It’s just a hunch, given that it’s sections of text (not photos) you’re struggling to display. But I think having less going on with the page would help as well.
Re: sidebar length, I tried to catch a full page screenshot of what I see on that page, and my screenshot tool gave up about 1/4 through :( Tried again, making sure to do nothing else while waiting for it to generate (I’m on a fairly new MPB) and this time I got it. It had to take three long screenshots totaling over 165MB. I’ll just include a screenshot of the screenshots.
And I’ll also include a screenshot of a screenshot of Discover for reference.
-
Thanks again. I knew the sidebar was long, but hadn’t really noticed how much it had grown in the last couple of years. I’m going to try to reduce it to about half the present length.
One odd thing I noticed in the screenshot that you provided @supernovia is that it seems to show an image at the bottom, below the Feedly button. I don’t see any image on my site there and never have. I don’t even remember what Feedly is, just something I heard about a few years ago and added, then forgot about.
Btw, the issue has not been resolved, but I have recently seen some similar effects when visiting a couple of other sites. This happened a few days ago. I don’t think they were WordPress.com sites, and I meant to bookmar the pages where the issues occurred, but forgot to do so.
You might be right about the graphics card. I plan on running some hardware diagnostics test ASAP. Thanks a bunch for all of your help.
-
Is there any way of hiding some items in a Links widget? I don’t find a links shortcode, so I presume there isn’t one available.
-
I don’t see any image on my site there and never have. I don’t even remember what Feedly is, just something I heard about a few years ago and added, then forgot about.
The image is an ad because you’re on a free site.
Feedly is an RSS feed reader.
Is there any way of hiding some items in a Links widget? I don’t find a links shortcode, so I presume there isn’t one available.
The Links widget does not work based on a shortcode, but based on the links you’ve added to the Links section in WP-Admin. There you can assign links to a category, which I see you’ve already did. Then you can configure the widget to only display links from a specific category. If you want to display multiple categories, but not all, then you’ll need a separate widget for each category.
-
@kokkieh,
Thanks for the info.The Links widget does not work based on a shortcode…
Yes, I know that, of course. I asked about shortcode with the faint hope that I might be able to preserve the links section whole and yet display only a portion of it using shortcode, customized to hide some links, inserted into a text widget.
you can configure the widget to only display links from a specific category.
I’d overlooked the possibility of hiding selected link categories. It’s actually exactly what I was looking for, that is, short of the ideal of shortcode in a text widget, which doesn’t seem to be possible. Thanks for pointing that out. : )
-
The image is an ad because you’re on a free site.
Ah! And I don’t see any ads ever on WordPress.com because of ad blockers. Hadn’t thought of that. : )
-
Yeah, I’m still guessing your graphics card is to blame, or at least a hardware acceleration setting / driver. Still, these changes should make a difference for other folks who view your site, and may help your own system as well.
-
Then you can configure the widget to only display links from a specific category. If you want to display multiple categories, but not all, then you’ll need a separate widget for each category.
I misunderstood what you’re saying here. The mistake I made, one that I’ve not only made myself before but often detected and corrected many times in this forum when made by others, was temporarily forgetting that widget visibility settings do not affect what displays in a widget but rather where it displays.
The “Select link category” option, then is the only relevant customizing option, and it would obviously be problematic in this case in a single widget due to the numerous link categories. I may consider your second suggestion, using a “separate widget for each category.”
-
-
The page I loaded was about 4MB without streaming any videos, which is quite large for a single webpage even now.
Do you remember which page that was? I thought that you had been referring to the same page that you’d mentioned and linked to earlier, this one. So I added up the sizes of all of the images in that page and the total came to 1.14MB. It’s been my understanding that image typically take up a lot more space than either videos or text. What else do you see in that page that might bring the total anywhere close to 4MB?
-
I don’t know what page @supernovia viewed, but https://songbook1.wordpress.com/fx/si/songbook-1890-1969-selected-standards-and-hits-pages/, for example, loads over 4.5MB of data in my browser. You can check this by opening the developer console of your browser and looking at the Network tab while loading a page.
Considering that page only contains a few links, almost all that data comes from your sidebar.
I added up the sizes of all of the images in that page and the total came to 1.14MB. It’s been my understanding that image typically take up a lot more space than either videos or text.
Video files can be exponentially larger than image files, depending on the length and quality of the video. And with text it comes down to how much.
But the actual content of your site is not all that loads either. There’s HTML, CSS and JavaScript files also, and the more widgets you have, the more of that has to load on your page.
-
Thanks for the info.
I decided to remove the links widget entirely from the sidebar and to create instead a page to display links. However, since there doesn’t appear to be a links shortcode I couldn’t easily create a links display as I had done with pages years ago. My Page Index page, linked to in the header menu, was created to because the list of pages was too long to display in the pages widget in the sidebar.
In the absence of a shortcode I instead created my Links page (https://songbook1.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=170623&action=edit) by copying and pasting the Links widget list from the sidebar into the page editor window. This produced one or more formatting errors when published, causing misalignment of the sidebar. I know that I can manually edit the content of the page to resolve the formatting issues, but is there any easy way of transforming the content into a normal list, or set of lists? I tried the “clear formatting” icon a couple of times but it seemed to have no effect.
-
Video files can be exponentially larger than image files, depending on the length and quality of the video.
Is that true wrt embedded videos from YouTube or Dailymotion as opposed to uploaded video files. I don’t have VideoPress. Also most of my embedded videos are music recordings, typically 3-6 minutes long. How can I tell how much space they are using?
-
I was able to resolve the formatting error issue, described above, though I failed to identify the cause, by removing all of the div tags from the text editor in the page mentioned above. However, updating it after additions and subtractions from the WP-Admin links list will be problematic.
-
The page load is just every thing in your browser has to load to display your page. So the total is going to include stuff from YouTube if you’re embedding things from YouTube.
Sorry about the links issue. :/ One possible solution is to periodically re-add the links widget and copy from that.
-
The page load is just every thing in your browser has to load to display your page.
That wasn’t my question. I meant could embedded Youtube videos that haven’t been loaded to the media library, and are only 3-6 minutes in length, really “be exponentially larger than image files, depending on the…quality of the video.”?
-
Does the size depend at all upon whether the video is uploaded with VideoPress or just embedded with WP YouTube shortcode?
-
I’m guessing that quality is not a factor, since the video shortcodes that I use don’t, as far as I know, include quality customization options.
-
Cancel that last post. That HD videos will be larger seems reasonable to me, although this is obviously all news to me, but “exponentially” larger?
- The topic ‘extremely long random character strings as search terms in stats’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 