Mike Arrington has an interesting post on CrunchNotes about the difficulties in keeping a popular blog like TechCrunch live. He blames third party widgets, advertising technologies and blog publishing software for contributing to his problems.
There are many culprits. First, we have a lot of third party widgets, ads and analytics apps running on the site. They are often the cause for slow load times. FM Publishing, our advertising network, often slows down the site and then other things pile on to crush it.
Today we had three problems. FM is updating their software and caused massive . We switched to the new version of wordpress which is clearly not bug free. And on top of that we have a number of plugins that are acting weird on the new wordpress software. One of them took us down earlier tonight.
Another culprit is MyBlogLog, which we've had to strip off the site a number of times because of slowdowns.
Jeremy Zawodney provides several good reasons why badges and widgets can cause problems for blogs. Too much widget bling can slow down your blog and/or make your blog look hideous. Besides the only widget your blog really needs is the supreme widget (thx Mad Techie Woman).
