Springwidgets.com
I love the idea of springwidgets.com (http://www.springwidgets.com) but everything I'm seeing there takes sooo damn long to load.
If only someone would make a faster loading version - quickwidgets.com or something, then bloggers and site owners everywhere could add some really useful and powerful features to their sites easily and with little penalty on the loading front!
Oh well, another idea for the pot!
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Thanks for your interest in SpringWidgets. We are always looking for ways to improve our product. I’d love to have you get in contact with our developers to see if you could discuss the issues that you are having with the load time. I’d like to determine where you are seeing the problem so that we can eliminate it.
thanks!
-Don (SpringWidgets)
I admit I’ve not delved into the code enough to determine where the speed problems lay (don’t have the time I’m afraid), but there are couple of things that may be a cause off the top of my head.
A lot of the widgets rely on third party content so the request probably goes mysite->spingwidgets->thirdparty->(possibly springwidgets)->mysite
If this is the case then round trip alone can cause significant lag to the originating site.
The ways I’d look to resolve this would be pre-caching of information at springwidgets, so only one request has to be made.
Geographic distribution of the caches so there’s at least a major one on each continent.
Provision of a local caching plugin for people who can implement such things (e.g. self hosted wordpress users) – this could also provide a distributed cache of content should things go that far, and its in the user agreement that by using the plugin you can also become a node (or have an opt-in/out).
If flash is being used pre-cache content client side while the user is looking at the main portion of the site if possible.