Thursday, December 31, 2009

I hate HaloScan

I’m just about to put up a post and all I need to finish it is a link to something at Grim’s. I go to his blog to get the URL. What do I see? A blank screen and in my status bar at the bottom the ominous message: Connecting to www.haloscan.com.

Time passes. Oceans rise and fall. Kingdoms prosper and crumble. Look! Transferring data from www.haloscan.com. Now I have the red screen and I can see the words.

I simply do not understand HaloScan. Sometimes it loads right up and all is well. Other times I could read War and Peace before it deigns to respond. If I disable it via AdBlock the blogs that use it load super-fast but I can’t comment.

I hate HaloScan. But not as much as I hate those vertical banner ads that display on top of the text in my iMac/Firefox configuration. Luckily I can disable those without losing functionality.

When I started this blog, I decided I’d never have videos, ads, continuously refreshing links, bottleneck access points, or slow-loading graphics. Every time I'm tempted to reverse that decision, I go into a Website that has one or more of those “enhancements” and remember I’m fighting the good fight for all of us who access the Internet from our home computers rather than our employers’ - and don’t have blazing fast access and more memory than NASA and NORAD combined.

3 comments:

Grim said...

Sorry about that. Blame Mike the Marine -- it was his suggestion I use HS, O these long years ago. :)

Elise said...

Do I look stupid? I'm not blaming a guy named "Mike the Marine" for anything.

And no apologies necessary. Quite a few bloggers on Blogspot/Blogger use HaloScan. And I've had one person who reads this blog say that my commenting software (the default Blogger/Google one) refused to recognize her id for a long time.

I figure if it drives me crazy enough, I'll just turn HaloScan off again on your blog. Until, of course, I'm compelled to comment by something you or one of your colleagues says.

Grim said...

Heh. I dropped in on Mike the Marine today, since this post made me think of him for the first time in a while. What should I see? A post complaining about Haloscan.