If you noticed the site loaded a little slowly this week, it’s because I animated the top banner. Doing so involved a little bit of Javascript and Flash, and that stuff has to load the first time you visit the page. Once you’ve visited this site with the new header, it should load quickly in repeat visits. I had been playing with a few ideas for new banners at the top of the site and couldn’t pick one, so I decided that I should just rotate them. I hope they’re pleasing to the eye.

Now a reminder of an older, less frequently used feature. When I activated this feature a long time ago, I posted instructions on how to “Rate the Windbag.” The number of regular visitors to the site has grown by leaps and bounds since then, so I’ll post this again for those of you who are new. While older posts have rating counts as high as 400 or 500, I’m getting several times that many visitors on even a slow day now. So perhaps not everyone knows what those dots are for.

This is a 5-point rating system. If you like the post, click on the dot to the far right. If you think I’m out of my ever-lovin’ mind, click on the dot on the far right. Just kidding. The dot on the left is worth 1 point, the one on the right worth 5, and I leave it to you to discern the values of the remaining three.

Each time a user clicks a dot it’s added to the tally, the number on the right. The average rating is on the left. In the graphic above, 4 users have responded with an average rating of 3.8.

This diagram illustrates the difference between the way a designer sets up a web page, with how he thinks the reader will scan it in mind, and the way the average web surfer actually looks through the page. It’s a pretty big difference, isn’t it? By the same token, I tend to assume that those five little dots look like they’re clickable… but apparently not everybody gets it right away. Oh well.

That’s why, when you see the numbers at the bottom of the posts, things won’t always make sense. I’ll have a post with a low vote count, but with one comment, and dozens (sometimes hundreds) of comment views. So, while the post has been read between a thousand and two thousand times (that’s how many daily visitors I get), only one person may have found reason to comment, and not everybody decided to read his/her comment. Even fewer decided (or knew how to) vote to rate the post. It’s actually very interesting to see, especially in light of the server stats that I receive daily!

Of course, if you’re reading this post on one of the websites that syndicate it, you’re not eligible to vote. You have to actually come to bismarckmandanblog.com to do so.

Have fun. The old Democrat adage “vote early, vote often!” doesn’t apply here.