Read More Right Here…

Read More Right Here…

July 21st, 2008 @ 4:15 pm by Mrs. Bee
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We’re trying something this week where we restrict the “read more right here” option to the first few posts.

We’ve been wrestling with the “Read more right here” option for over a year now. By loading all the text (and pictures!) of all of our posts on the frontpage, the frontpage has become huge (over 3MB!). This sometimes overloads our servers, causing the site to become slow. Our site even crashed on Friday afternoon because of this.

We’ve tried work-arounds like installing new software, buying more servers, disabling frontpage features, and reducing the number of posts on each page, but none have really worked. We did some research, and even the largest frontpage (e.g. Amazon.com) weigh in at only 500kb (1/6 the size of Weddingbee). And according to Alexa, Weddingbee is slower than 83% of other websites! So we definitely had to do something to speed things up and keep our servers going.

At the same time though, we were reluctant to just turn off the “read more right here” feature. It has always been very popular, especially since almost no other site supports it. The last time we disabled it, we got some of the most strongly worded comments we’ve ever gotten! I think it took me a few months to recover emotionally.

So rather than disable the feature entirely, we’re trying out a compromise:

“Read more right here” will still appear on the top few posts, so frequent checkers of the site will be able to read more right here on new posts as they come in.
We will continue to have the full text of the posts in our RSS feed (we’re one of the few sites out there that does this as well). So if you vastly prefer reading the full text on all posts, you can read the site through RSS.

I hope you guys understand where we are coming from, and that this represents a good compromise between site speed and user-friendliness. We will try it out for a week or so, and see how our servers hold up.

We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Thanks,
Mrs. Bee

ps it’s live on the site now!

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45 Responses to “Read More Right Here…”

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Bee

frenchbulldog (message) 7,730 posts, Bee Keeper

Sounds like a good idea I hope it works.

7/21/08 @ 4:28 pm (reply)

Member

yiska (message) 177 posts, Blushing bee

I notice that Bees often link images in their posts to offsite servers (Picasa, Xanga, etc) and I imagine that much of the 3M homepage size comes from loading photos that are not necessarily reduced in size/resolution/etc for optimal web viewing.

I know that you guys are using WordPress — I am also a fan. I’m also a web developer that likes to use it for CMSs. I don’t know how the Bees post but if you could encourage them to use WP’s internal Media management (2.6 has much nicer upload features, btw) you could probably control resizing a lot better. It may take some training and some time.

Personally, I’ve REALLY been enjoying the “Read more right here” feature precisely because then I don’t have to wait for the page to load again and often I skim posts quickly.

7/21/08 @ 4:29 pm (reply)

Member

yiska (message) 177 posts, Blushing bee

3MB rather… sorry, I’m from Minnesota and 3M is based here… it didn’t even look weird when I typed it!

7/21/08 @ 4:30 pm (reply)

Member

Mr. Bee (message) 4,369 posts, Honey bee

Yah all images are uploaded through Weddingbee… they may link to outside sites like Picasa or Xanga though?

We’ve definitely been optimizing a lot of images manually recently, but it hasn’t made a significant difference. A lot of posts have lots of pictures, so even if they are under 50k each… it all adds up!

7/21/08 @ 4:31 pm (reply)

Guest

Katharine

I hope it works well! I’m a big fan of the “right here” option, because I hate ones where you click and wait for a whole new page….I don’t have the fastest internet in the world, you see. Actually Weddingbee opens pretty fast for me compared to, say, many photography blogs.

7/21/08 @ 4:34 pm (reply)

Bee

Mrs. Bee (message) 3,235 posts, Sugar bee

@Katharine: there are certainly slower sites out there, but they don’t have the volume of traffic that we do. thousands of people accessing weddingbee at the same time has a big impact on our site speed and up time.

7/21/08 @ 4:36 pm (reply)

Guest

mrsmartintobe

Being the weddingbee obsessive that I am, I noticed this change right away. That said, I used to run a few websites myself, so I know the pain of bandwith suckage. I think this is a nice way to please people without making the site slower or you or Mr. Bee paying through the nose to make improvements to the site.

7/21/08 @ 4:43 pm (reply)

Guest

baseball

I have to say I dislike the lack of “right here.” I’d become quite spoiled by it, and it was one of my favorite things about Weddingbee (functionality-wise, anyway). Really, with all of the extra clicking and moving from one page to another, it takes me 3x as long to read as it did to wait for the page to load (but I’d never had problems there).

7/21/08 @ 4:49 pm (reply)

Guest

lilstargazer

Suggestion: Try using Ajax?

7/21/08 @ 4:51 pm (reply)

10.

Guest

Starry-Eyed Barefoot Bride

As a “google reader” weddingbee-er that I am - THANK YOU for posting full posts!!!! The ones that don’t half the time I never click on the link to see the full thing - that defeats the purpose of my google reader! (Though -I end up clicking on a lot of bee links anyway to make comments, I still thank you for not requiring me to!)

7/21/08 @ 4:52 pm (reply)

11.

Guest

baseball

However, at least it’s a compromise? Which, I’ve heard, is a vital aspect to a good marriage. So perhaps this is good training for me. Good luck and thanks for working so hard for us!

7/21/08 @ 4:54 pm (reply)

12.

Member

hwong14 (message) 239 posts, Helper bee

Thank you for keeping full-length RSS posts, and while I like the “click here to read more” aspect, I think limiting it to the top three posts is a good compromise.

7/21/08 @ 4:59 pm (reply)

13.

Member

marianneinvan (message) 197 posts, Blushing bee

I mostly read WeddingBee from GoogleReader, clicking through to the posts that I want to read the comments or comment on, so I only noticed the RMRH feature last week. I can live without it, especially if removing it makes the site faster!

7/21/08 @ 5:01 pm (reply)

14.

Member

Mr. Bee (message) 4,369 posts, Honey bee

@lilstargazer: Hey there! We actually did try AJAX, and it did make the frontpage smaller. But it resulted in a lot more database calls than usual, which slowed down our database server alas.

We’re working on optimizing our database to handle this sort of thing better. In the meantime, AJAX isn’t really an option for us…

7/21/08 @ 5:04 pm (reply)

15.

Guest

lilstargazer

For the database calls, you can cache the database data or cache the whole entry. Have you tried using memcache? or some other caching methods?

7/21/08 @ 5:07 pm (reply)

16.

Bee

Miss Avocado (message) 1,543 posts, Bumble bee

Mrs. Bee, what about doing a really detailed post about some of the RSS feed readers that people can use to read Weddinbee? I suspect that many do not use them because they do not know how. Though I love the “read more” for reading through the archives, I never really use it on the front page because my reader shows me the full post each time.

7/21/08 @ 5:09 pm (reply)

17.

Member

Mr. Bee (message) 4,369 posts, Honey bee

@lilstargazer: Yah we’ve installing memcached… we’re in the process of configuring it. We’re also adding load balancing across multiple webservers, and other goodies.

We don’t really post about all the backend work we do to support the site, because I don’t know if most of our readers are interested! But rest assured, BIL Bee and I spend many of our nights and weekends on technical projects to keep the site fast :-).

7/21/08 @ 5:18 pm (reply)

18.

Guest

lilstargazer

@Mr. Bee: haha yes. I’m a web developer and a computer geek to boot, so I love the backend stuff. The caching should help alot. Hope you can get the read more here link back up soon. Love that weird little link. LoL….

7/21/08 @ 5:22 pm (reply)

19.

Guest

kaymarie

i have to say, i get to read weddingbee usually once a day. and if you remove the “read more here” function i may never venture outside of my reader. i enjoy looking at the actual site more, but not if i have to “open in new tab” 15-20 posts! “read more here” has been my favorite feature on weddingbee and i will be very sad to see it reduced to the first few posts… i’ve never had too much of an issue loading weddingbee and my internet speed is quite low.. i’m not sure the term used to measure internet speed (kbps i think?) but my boyfriend’s is as high as 100 and mine at home is as low as 11-24 and i have no problems loading the page! i do thank you for keeping the whole text available in my reader though! i just am so sad to see my favorite feature so drastically reduced!!

7/21/08 @ 5:46 pm (reply)

20.

Member

briannie (message) 273 posts, Helper bee

I miss the RMRH option, too… but I think it’s a good comprimise to have that available for the first 5 or so posts (well, the most 5 recent) and then have the remaining posts link to another page. I know I’m not being very tech-savvy right now w/ my lingo =P

7/21/08 @ 5:47 pm (reply)

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