‘Twas The Blog Before Christmas…

Twas the blog before Christmas,
When all through the server
Not a spam bot was stirring,
Not even a flammer

The template was all designed with care,
In hopes that a blog update would soon appear.

The editors had written articles ahead
While visions of paychecks danced in their heads
I tweeted geeks both familiar and unknown
And Facebooked loved ones on my iPhone

When all of a sudden there arose such a clatter,
I logged into the server to see what was the matter.
The site was crawling at a very slow pace
Was I just Digged by the entire human race?

I checked Google Analytics to see my stats
It pulled yesterday’s report, so that ended that
For I needed to see why my blog was so slow
So I loaded up Sitemeter in order to know

But the stats revealed nothing out of the blue
So I shouted “It must be hacker–or two!”
I checked the IP logs to find an anomoly
But all the addresses were pointing back at me

Then a thought occured that made me dread
“They’re hotlinking my image, in order to embed
A photo of mine without giving me credit
Stealing my bandwidth instead of using Photobucket”

But the server reported that this wasn’t so
Making me frantic (for I needed to know)
“If it wasn’t hackers, hotlinkers or Digg traffic
Then what was making my blog catastraphic!”

I posted on forums, seeking wisdom and advice
Then who should appear Guru Ma.tt (who’s nice)
He gave me a emoticon wink, plus a grin
And said “Did you forget to check your plugins?”

See Also

How Do I Get Myself a Blogging Mentor?

The wisdom was perfect! I had been a fool
To ignore the plugins that I use as a tool
To enhance my blog beyond it’s design
That could be increasing the page loading time

Many minutes later the culprit was found
A plugin that updated that wasn’t sound
That caused my weblog to load half way
So I deactivated the plugin without delay

And now the blog loads up quick and fast
So the readers can enjoy great content at last
And now I can go to bed, shouting with delight
“Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

Happy Holidays from everyone here at Splashpress Media, and of course the Blog Herald!