Today I was modifying some of the code on my blog. I love to play around with PHP and MySQL databases…. Anyway, as I was working on some updates and looking at some of the backend of Wordpress, I noticed my “little spinny thing” (official technical term for the animated icon on the browser indicating the page is still loading) was still spinning after the page should have been done loading. Apparently it was still trying to load something.

Even though I didn’t change any code that would cause any problems like this, I looked a little deeper. The problem was the social bookmarker plugin I was using. I had it active on the site for a couple of weeks and never noticed the problem before. The way the plugin works is that it puts links to the common social sites so a visitor can easily click on the icon of choice to quickly and easily add the blog article to the social website. The issue boiled down to the external links to the images.

A lot of plugin or add-on features for many blogs and other websites use external links do display data (in this case image files) that is stored on external servers. There are several advantages to this.

Here are some of the common advantages:

• Easy for the website owner (usually just a simple javascript snippet or other link pasted into site)
• External server controls data and can update without site owner doing anything
• Eliminates bandwith from site owner. All data is transferred between the client’s browser and the external server.

However, there are also disadvantages:

• Site owner does NOT have any control over the data on the external server or how it is displayed. This can cause formatting or layout issues on the primary website that can be difficult to debug.
• Different browsers may display the data differently and the primary site owner may not be able to correct the differences.
• The primary site may not display properly or it may not even show up at all if the client’s browser cannot access the external server. This is the problem I was having.

My problem was that a couple of the images could not be loaded from the external social web sites. This caused my page to “hang” on these images and not fully load the page. I could have manipulated some of the code to change them to load at the end of the page but I just didn’t like the “spinny thing” going all the time. I also could have used local copies of the images. However, for now I have just deactivated the plugin.

So, let this be a lesson to everyone with a blog (or website) using these external site based techniques. They can be nice when everything works but they can also be a real pain when they don’t. Sometimes you may not see the issue yourself if the connection to the external server and your browser is fine but someone else may be having trouble that you are never aware of.

The moral of the story is…….

Sometimes external links are bad.

- Hill Robertson