I have been spoiled by five years of broadband access.

The Noreaster that hit the east coast did something to our telephone line that made our DSL modem unable to retrieve any information (phone lines still work ok, though. hmph.) Rather than go through all the trouble to get it fixed, since we're moving in a month, I just got an earthlink account and we're using dialup.

It's amazing how much of the web -- including my own website -- has been designed assuming "everyone" has broadband access. Yesterday I was clawing at my face waiting for pages to load.

This morning was a little better. But that's because I was tired.

I've been using kate to do my web pages for about a year. Hand-coding is a lot easier with auto-indent and color cues.

But a number of other factors are slowing down my site:

- my comic graphic sizes have grown by an average of 20K (larger graphic size, use of more panels, re-introduction of color fade in panel backgrounds)

- flash ads are now standard on Keenspot (sigh)

- some site elements (keenspot branding bar and newsbox) I have no control over

I probably need to reduce the size of cascading style sheet, too, but that only needs to get loaded once, and it's all text.