@Simone: Site shuts down? Hmm. Well, let’s hope that doesn’t happen anymore. I worked very hard last week to decrease load times and increase performance and compatibility for the Anvil.

One thing to consider is this — I offer far, far more as far as content goes on this site than most blogs. The Multimedia, rotating polls, and a contextual ad scheme for instance.

Now, as far as all of this goes, it can do nothing but get faster — if I meet a level of success where I an afford a private server instead of a shared one (that’s the biggest reason the site ever has problems), then you’ll see this page load in 3-6 seconds instead of 26. Obviously though, much of it has to do with the individual users connection and what web browsers they use.

If people are using anything other than MSIE 7 or Firefox 2, there may be problems. If people have dialup instead of DSL or cable, slow loading is simply a reality of life (and if anyone is still on dialup today, I just don’t know what to say — prices are too reasonable for faster connection speeds to even excuse that any longer and it’s more than worth the cost. I could live without cable television, but not without my cable internet!), and as for computer system performance — I run my entire site and do all my work on a computer that is 7 years old. That’s right SEVEN. So, there’s no excuse for anyone in that department either. New computers are CHEAP today. Even laptops. And they’ll all be faster than what I use, guaranteed.

All that said, please, please, please, anyone that reads the Anvil and runs into problems, consider posting them in the Support section of my forums, so that we may all benefit from solutions found and I can be made aware of goof-ups that are my fault — and those are many.

Simone: Switch to Firefox and this site works great.

Keep up the great work. You deserve this success…and much, much more.