Today I’m a Slithering Reptile in the TTLB Ecosystem. The descriptions are cute, and very humbling! I was an “insignificant microbe” for a while when I first had the blog. I was a “Flappy Bird” for less than a day once – I think that’s the highest up I’ve gotten.

In addition to the regular blog stats, The Truth Laid Bare now has graphs of incoming links and outgoing links (by frequency). Here’s my most frequent incoming links graph:

(larger, interactive version)

These things are great, but I’ve been having some technical difficulties with both TTLB and Technorati.

The main problem is that both TTLB and Technorati seem to slow down the loading time of my blog, freezing it for a wee bit while the scripts do whatever they do. I’m not really sure how it works.

It would be great if faster-loading solutions were implemented. I’m not sure what I can do on this end. I did try a WordPress plugin to speed up the loading time of TTLB with some kind of cache, but it doesn’t really do anything that I can tell.

Also, I can’t view the Technorati site with Firefox. It doesn’t appear to process the style sheet at all. When I go to the site, I have to open IE. Even then, the site loads very slowly. I can’t tell whether it is more to do with my own settings, or with their site.

The last problem is about my own settings, I’m sure. On every computer but my own, I can see the Technorati image and links on my sidebar. Here I don’t see it, either in Firefox or IE. I’ve played with settings for my firewall, antivirus, spyblaster, and everything else I can think of, but it just doesn’t show. Is it considered a malicious javascript?

Suggestions welcome.