Wedding Blog
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:
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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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.
3MB rather… sorry, I’m from Minnesota and 3M is based here… it didn’t even look weird when I typed it!
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!
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.
@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.
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.
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).
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!)
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!
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.
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!
@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…
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?
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.
@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 :-).
@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….
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!!
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
I think this is a great compromise!
Like others, I haven’t noticed a severely annoying lag when loading posts - BUT with that said, it’s a little disheartening to hear that this feature crashed the site on Friday afternoon! I’m really glad that Mrs. Bee, Mr. Bee, and BIL Bee take this downtime seriously enough to make a good compromise for us readers! I’d be super sad if WB crashed more often - so THANK YOU!!
I really miss the RMRH function……… Doesn’t it add more stress to the server that everyone has to go back to the front page to read the next post?
Personally, I didn’t mind the slow loading time, it was always worth the wait!
If you’re going to disable the RMRH fuction, can you please beef-up the next/previous post links and move them to right below the post, and not burried under that comments? Maybe labeling them previous post/next post instead of the titles of the posts would help users utilize the buttons.
I think it’s a nice compromise, but I really do miss the feature. How do you do look at the site through RSS? If I could read all the posts how I’m used to that way I would love to know how to do it. Thanks!
I agree with kaymarie. And I’ve never noticed weddingbee being a slow site at all. If RMRH disappears, I suspect I’ll only be reading the first couple lines of most posts.
one more idea, in addition to beefing up the previous/next post buttons, it would be nice to add a “newest” post button too
@violarulz: There should be a next/prev at the top of the post (as well as under the comments)?
@Lillindy: Try this intro to Google Reader: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9745368-2.html
@Jay: Just to clarify: RMRH is not disappearing… it’s still going to be on the first three posts of the frontpage.
@violarulz: If you click on the BLOG tab or the Weddingbee logo/bride, you should go back to the frontpage and any new posts will show up!
What about putting less posts on the front page? Keep RMRH for the first page, but only have 3-4 articles on the front page. If the front page has 8 posts at 3MB, then the new front page can have 4 posts at 1.5MB.
@Laura: we actually reduced the number of posts per page from 10 to 7 for a couple weeks recently, but unfortunately it didn’t have a huge impact. If we had only 3-4 posts per page, and we have 20-25 posts per day, that’d also dramatically decrease # of comments per post and # of posts people would read.
Well, i’m one o fthose who takes thigns as they are. I certainly appreciate all the care you guys do to the site. i greatly apprecitate it and understand that sometimes in order to make things better, we have to do a few things we’d rather not do….sounds a lot like marriage. 
Thanks for the compromise, Mr and Mrs Bee (and BIL Bee).
It does soften the blow.
Read more right here is awesome… but as long as I can read the whole thing in my reader (which is AWESOME BTW.. THANK YOU) I’m cool ! Thanks for your hard work Bees !
I can honestly say I never once used “read more right here”. In fact I didn’t even notice it’s existence until I read this post!
I guess I don’t mind an extra “click” here and there, plus I like reading the comments.
Hey Bees!
I definitely love the Right Here feature…I would read WB on Google Reader, but I thought it was better to read it from the site so that you get your advertising money??
Would it be much more for you to make the current day ‘Right Here’ and the others click to view???
Hmmm. Can I just say that this morning Weddingbee took longer to load and open than it ever has before? Coinicidence?
@Katharine: Our server just crashed - I’m not sure why. I just rebooted the server and it seems better now.
The issue may be the new code allowing Read More Right Here for the top few posts. If it persists, we’ll have to find another approach.
Hrm I guess I’m going to have to figure out what “RSS” means and how to use it…because I also immediately noticed the lack of “right here” and opening a new tab for every post after the first three was very time consuming and definitely effected my desire to read everyone’s posts which I usually do. I can understand the difficulty- but the 15 tabs aren’t going to do it for me hehe. *goes in search of this elusive mysterious RSS feed”
Thank you for all your efforts. Whatever you need to do.
I don’t understand why people have to open more tabs-when I click on ‘read more’ it opens in the same tab i’ve been using. is that just my computer? then i use the next/previous post links (the titles) to read the other posts, which also open in the same tab.
But, i would LOVE if you added a next/previous post link between the post and the comment, so that i could read the post and easily move on to the next without having to scroll through the comments.
I am also sad. I only get on 1-2 times a day, and I also missed the RMRH feature immediately. I guess I will just have to look into one of those readers too. But like the pp said, doesn’t that hurt your advertising $$ due to less hits? I thought that was the main reason most site dont post full posts on the readers.
I’m with Kaleigh. What’s is RSS?
I understand why you need to change the RMRH feature but unfortunatly I can’t check the site every hour or so to see what new things crop up. My work doesn’t allow it. It takes me longer to read WB now because it has to load the full post. I never thought it was that slow to begin with. If it takes a few secvonds longer to load but saves me time because I don’t have to open up an individual post I would raither wait a few more seconds.
I have an unrelated question. Where did Ms. Chickadee go? She hasn’t blogged since April.
Chickadee got really busy around her wedding, and so wasn’t able to blog regularly… it can be hard to balance Real Life and Blogging, so we totally understand when RL takes precedence!
I don’t mind needing to click on the link, but I think it’s now up to the bees to write their posts in ways that people will want to read beyond the jump! Miss Seabreeze’s post today did that pretty successfully.
My only problem with having to click on the read more link it is that whenever I go back I have to scroll down the page again to find the next post, which is mega annoying. And I don’t like to click the next post buttons because it throws me off.
i miss the link. i do most of my reading on those links and i think it is frustrating having to click back to read other post.
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Mrs. Bee, New York
Age and Occupation: 29, Weddingbee Publisher
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 33, Internet
Engagement Date: May 7, 2004
Wedding Date: March 5, 2005
Venue: Westside Loft, New York
About Me: Yes, my name really is Bee! I love my blogging, wikis, and tabasco sauce!
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