I like this Al, I like TPMDC also.

And I like the ability, as I have written before, to communicate back and forth. We were just in the chat room last week praising you.

A non-technical preface or side comment might help there.

Speaking of website stuff... since my email seems to have vanished into the ozone, here's something I sent it a little while ago:

Website improvement request

Make that plural.

First, I am generally pleased with TPM, and started my first ever blog here on New Years Day.

1) I suggest you start a section or blog for site comments, complaints, bugs, and meta-discussion. I've seen individuals post such in their personal blogs. Having a centralized "Site Feedback" or "Help Forum" blog or section might be valuable.

2) Can you reduce the overhead of your pages? I'm running a 1.8GHz processor with plenty of memory and hard disk space under XP and browsing with Firefox. While slowdowns are not nearly as bad as they were in late 2008 there remain inexplicable delays in opening many pages. I suspect slow javascript as one factor. I also notice that many ads take a long time for URL DNS resolution ("looking for...") like 5-10 seconds (could be my ISP DNS is slow?) and otherwise slow down pages ("Waiting for ..."). You could put all ads at the end of the HTML so that if they are slow at least the main content is available right away.

3) Move the personal access buttons (edit, your blog, blog now...) to be near the "Log In" button. I need to view pages at a siize such that when I click Log In, the useful access buttons are slightly off screen. "Your blog" and "blog now" are the most used buttons (in that order for me). If they were on the left of the row, that would help, if moving them next to the Log In button won't work.

4) Log In is sometimes erratic. Should I stay logged in as long as the browser is open (one or more tabs or windows)? It seems I often have to Sign In again in order to leave a comment, but sometimes the site already knows.

5) After commenting, there is a "return to original entry" link. This is sorta handy. It would be very nice to be able to 'return to comment', with the link being either the permalink for the comment being replied to, or the new comment just submitted. In longer threads, it's a real pain to find where I was when I commented and continue reading comments from there. The Back button doesn't help because the text entry box shows up at the bottom of the thread, not right at the target comment location.

5a) Return to entry seems to be automatic when replying to Cafe articles. Is there a reason it's not auto for personal blog comments (see5 above)?

Again, thanks for running the site. I hope you can implement some or all of these suggestions soon.