Ok, so you're not whiny. Well, some of you are whiny, but I heart you all anyway. The sidebar has returned with full bells and whistles. Some elements of the abortive v3.0 design are staying too. I particularly like the tab bar and the archives page. I'll need to do some tweaking yet to sort out what should be on the tab bar and what should be in the sidebar.

Best of all, my page generation times are still pretty snappy. If you're curious enough to view my page source code, you'll see most of the sidebar content isn't there. The sidebar is now mostly just a framework. The content is loaded into each little box via AHAH. Without all the sidebar content, each page generates quickly. But with the asynchronous fetches, you're still downloading the same amount of data and you're using more transactions to do it. The overall time it takes for a complete page to load might have even increased, but there's still a noticeable improvement in the time it takes to load the main content and make that page usable. I think that's a fair trade.

So I suppose rather than being snarky, I should be thanking you for pushing me to solve my problem more creatively.

Pfft. Whiners.

Have you heard of Chinese Democracy? It's supposed to be the next Guns N' Roses album. It's been in production since 1994, which is long enough to turn it into a complete joke. ("We'll see democracy in China before we see Chinese Democracy.")

This weekend I downloaded an album labeled Chinese Democracy. Some of the tracks are studio, some are live. Who knows what version of what tracks will really be on the album, should it ever actually arrive?

Real or not, I am loving the track "Better." He might not be in the band anymore, but you can't deny Buckethead's influence on this one.