Speed Up Your Blog: Internalize Chicklets
Posted by Jon Lee in Efficiency, How-to, Web Development, tags: chicklets, Efficiency, internalization, speed-up-your-blog Chicklets are little buttons that let your readers easily subscribe to your RSS Feed using various readers. If you use Feedburner, they have a chicklet tool that lets you generate the HTML required to load different chicklets onto your page. If you simply copy and paste this code on to your blog, images are loaded from corresponding servers. (for example 
is loaded from Google’s servers)
Although the Google server is fast, a reader on your blog already has a connection open to your server. Instead of making them make another 8 connections to 8 different servers just to get these images, you can save the images, upload them to your server and link to them directly. It will use extra bandwidth but the images are so small, the increase in bandwidth would be negligible.
Also, if one of those servers happen to go down, it won’t take your chicklet down with them, nor will your page load speed be halted by a slow server connection. I ran into such a problem with Amazon ads when their server connection loaded very slowly and my page load would hesitate as a result.
The same approach can be applied to other external server images such as 
but “dynamic images” like your Feedburner count or MyBlogLog community pictures cannot (easily) be internalized onto your server.
There is one disadvantage. If one of the reader websites ever decides to change their logo or subscription image, your button would not be updated. A very minor inconvenience in my mind.
You could also do this with any other external files — although internalizing Javascript files (i.e. from Google Analytics) is risky. Personally I’d just stick with internalizing static images.
P.S. I made up the term “internalize”. If anyone knows the correct term, please let me know 
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