Jon,

In Firefox (2.0012 and 2.0013) on my 17″ monitor at 1280×1024 the “Excel Books” box appears directly under “Blog Still Slow” and obscures the first few words of the post. It’s been that way for some days now. I loaded the page in IE and it’s okay there. But in IE there’s an annoying repeating “SpreadSheet Converter” animated graphic between the last line of your first post and the “Comments” link. The graphic acts like a link (cursor turns to a hand) but clicking on it doesn’t do anything.

Good luck with getting back to speed!

Doug -

I haven’t tested in FireFox, but I have tested in SeaMonkey, which is based on Mozilla, uses FireFox extensions, and also includes Mozilla newsgroup and mail modules, which FireFox does not use. The blog renders nominally the same in SeaMonkey and in IE6 (same layout and same speed).

I’ve installed a WordPress plugin that caches blog pages as static pages, so for a period of time (3600 sec default) they can be loaded without calls to the database. This has led to a small improvement, but I suspect the hosting company has had no success with the MySQL servers. I wonder if they’re hoping that I’ll buy a dedicated hosting plan from them. However, other companies have indicated that this is not necessary for a site of my size, and the way the current company has supported me, if I needed such a plan, I’d get it elsewhere.

Your pages are loading at a normal speed now for me.

I am on my home laptop and the same Firefox issue with the “Excel Books” box covering the top of your first post - both on the home page and this comment page.

Doug -

Glad someone sees it in real time. It’s slow as molasses for me, even with the caching plugin installed.

Guess I’ll try installing Firefox on one of my machines, see if I can figure out what’s wrong with the templates.

Doug - FireFox 2.0013: display almost identical to IE, Maxthon (IE shell), and SeaMonkey, no parts misaligned as you mention.

Re speed: the first time a page is loaded, it’s slow. Thereafter, when it’s cached, it’s pretty fast. The main page seems not to be cached like the others. Maybe I need to fiddle with the settings. Engineer’s credo: if it ain’t broke, you ain’t fiddled with it enough.

Jon, FYI the display glitch I’m seeing is due to the AdBlock Plus addon.

Doug - I figured that out with help from Dick Kusleicka. FWIW, I tested with FF and AdBlock (not AdBlock Plus, didn’t realize there was such a thing), and the Google ads persisted even with the blocker enabled, and the page was properly displayed. I probably don’t have all the right filters. When I get to it, I’ll check it out. You guys are tough.

Doug - I hacked* away at the CSS, and after a few missteps, I think I have something that keeps the boxes along the left margin in FF and IE, whether FF has AdBlock running or not.

*Hack - what a caveman does with his stone axe to ward off a large scary creature.

Jon, It looks good from here!