Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Time to whack the “Hello Bar”?

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For the past few days, page loads here are stalled for long periods while waiting for www.hellobar.com — the orange banner at the top that encourages us to click through and support earthquake/tsunami relief in Japan.

While I appreciate the sentiment, this banner is seriously slowing down my access to the site (it appears to be at the top of every page).

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Comments

  1. On both Firefox on a Mac, and IE on a PC. BMG is noticably slower than almost any other site.

    <

    p>But that said, I think my issue predates the banner.

  2. I don’t mind the banner, which links to the Red Cross, in circumstances like this, but clicking directly on the Hello Bar goes to what appears to be a commercial outfit.

    <

    p>BMG became one of the slowest-loading sites I use before either of those appeared.  It’s amazing to watch on the bottom of the screen how much junk appears to be loading along with the site itself.  Seriously, Editors, dial it back before my experience becomes so unenjoyable that I only visit rarely.  Salon is another site I used to visit daily, often multiple times, but stopped because the various forms of advertising made it too much of a hassle.  There are plenty of sites that have figured out a way around this and yes, they’re still free.

    • The scripts that seem to be necessary are:
      bluemassgroup.com
      bostonblogs.com
      twimg.com

      <

      p>and maybe:
      quantserve.com
      googlesyndication.com
      fbcdn.com

      <

      p>Excessive use of JavaScript is Ruining The Internet!

    • The bar itself is supplied by hellobar.com, a “commercial outfit” (as you say).  The text inside the bar is written by us and can link to whatever we want – at the moment, the Red Cross.

      <

      p>Initially, it also seemed to me that the hello bar was slowing down the site, but that seems to have been largely solved – now it loads very quickly, at least for me.

  3. At least for me. And yes, it was hellobar itself that was causing an even worse wait than usual. Firefox displays what is going on in the lower left corner and it would just hang with “Waiting for hellobar.com” for as long as 10-15 seconds at times.

  4. But since Monday, the page is taking forever to load. (At least it isn’t as puncy as the Huffington Post’s website….)

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