The Playground

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If you have categories with lots of entries the pages tend to take a very long time to load. I read about a way to improve performance on Tom Sherman's site. Instead of including the entry body of everything in your category archives, do this for the last 10 entries. For everything else, just include the title, a small excerpt, and a link to the Individual Entry Archive. I tweaked his code slightly to give me the excerpt, added my own syles, and have a more user-friendly category listing on Toni's Corner of the World. This weblog has the most entries and would benefit from this tweak. I also trimmed the sidebar on the category and individual archive index pages to improve page loading time even more.

I changed the default excerpt length by going to the weblog's general settings page, and changing 40 to 80. Forty words was too short for the excerpts on the category listings because many of my posts start with the little quotes from Master Chen Hai Yang. I needed to let readers get past these inspirational tidbits.

At the end of each main index page on Spitting Into the Wind and Toni's Corner of the World you'll see a list of the previous 10 entries. I was reading through the tutorials on Elise's site and discovered Previous Entries and Lastn, with simple instructions for adding the code to your template. I've styled mine a little differently on both blogs.

On this weblog and Spitting Into the Wind I added the category and permalink functionality to the titles. Clicking on the title will now take you to the individual entry. This is a minor code change and well documented at Learning Movable Type. I've noticed that adding multiple categories doesn't work well with this tweak.

Adding a footer to your pages is really quite simple. I noticed the footer at Movalog and checked out the source coude to see where Arvind had placed it. One div up from the bottom. I tried a few different styles till I was satisfied with the look. Elise has a tutorial with step by step instructions.