Widgets, scripts and all that fashionable stuff is great – you sign up to the service and you can start pasting their code into your pages. Voila! you have a new stat counter – or popularity counter, whatever. They’re great, but the practice of loading external javascript files outside the header of your documents isn’t one that’s too friendly on the page-display times. In a sense, it’s just like whacking a great big image onto your pages.
Luckily, there is an equally fashionable method for improving the effect that these scripts have on the page. Using a simple animated graphic such as those from ajaxload.info and some CSS Wizardary, we can idenitify areas of the page that take a while to load, style them appropriately, and sit back in smug satisfaction.
Read More…
