Cleaning is not my favorite activity. Before the digital age, my office was a good place to show visitors what information overload can physically look like. Now, this expression is all in my computer or online -- so for my real-life visitors, things have become rather boring.
I still use the same techniques from the past where, about 90 percent of the time, I could quickly retrieve information from what, at first glance, appeared to be a disorganized pile of paper. Of course, about 10 percent of the time, it could take me up to a week to locate information. Even with all the search engines in place, incidentally finding information might take some time. That was not good for my image.
In the past week I received three independent complaints that my weblog was loading slowly. I wondered: what might cause that? For the first time I had posted some video clips, including interviews with the Asia-Pacific president of PR firm Edelman and sex blogger Muzi Mei, but I could not imagine that these little scripts could slow down my weblog so suddenly.
So, I used a strategy that is not limited to China, but certainly been made perfect here: I blamed somebody else. It's the government, it's the Internet censor, it's the pollution or the climate change. In this case I thought my Web host Bluehost was an obvious candidate for my anger. I started to announce that I needed a new host.
The good thing about a blog is that there is often somebody in my audience who can set me straight. His advice sounded familiar: Clean up your weblog. See, I also use my blog as my playground to test all kind of new gadgets -- but I hadn't always removed the leftovers of those experiments. That, he wrote, might be one other cause of my downloading problems.
He was right. I cleaned up my blog and it is up to speed again.
My sincere apologies to Bluehost for even thinking they were the cause. It was me.
... really do seem to slow everything down. They're usually...
