The Knitting Fiend

Remove those darn Weather Pixies. Just take them off. Now!

“But I like my Weather Pixie,” you say.

“Oh, yeah?” Say I. “Have you noticed it’s broken? All of them, on everyone’s page is broken. The Weather Pixie site seems to be down for the count.

I’ve been surfing a lot because I want to compile my various aggregators, checking out the side bars looking for evidence of “cat blogging” or “political buttons” etc. I couldn’t help noticing all those broken, yet somehow space hogging weather pixies.

Broken pixies are bad because they are large and hog space, they delay your page load while the browser wastes time trying to connect to the missing weather pixie site, and the big blank rectangle looks bad. So, off, off, say I!

As to my aggregators, I edited the link on my header so people can find the page listing the knit blog aggregators.¹ Right now, the list includes 4 aggregators and also asks people to suggest other categories. It says:

• Lucia’s Favorite Knitting Blogs..
• Knitting and Cats.
• Machine Knitting Blogs.
• Left Wing and Right Wing Knit bloggers.
• You suggest a category!

You’ll notice I did go ahead and collect some left and right wing blogs, which I found by searching for “Knitters against Bush” and “Knitters for Bush” buttons, or similar features. Mostly, once I thought of the idea, I was curious to compare the two groups. If you visit those blogs, you’ll that, at least currently, most only discuss knitting. I don’t find this surprising since there are no congressional elections coming up this fall. I assume this could change . . .

It also seems to me both groups seem to knit the same types of things.

I’m going to do “dogs” and “humorous” next. I know how to find the knitting and dog blogs pretty efficiently. If people are aware of hilariously funny knitting blogs, let me know. I’d like to get that list together.

Oh… I did some coding to solve something that could lead to unusual slow loading that can occur as the aggregator collects feeds. (I basically now collect feed and refresh the “cache” as a chron job. So any slowness should be “normal” slowness.) So now I can make the pages fairly big.

If you’d like your blog to appear on one of my aggregators, let me know.