For the "My Home" page I would like an option to turn on/off the various things. Specifically the challenge results. Though it'd be nice to be able to choose from a variety of things of what you can or don't include for the "My Home" page.
I must admit I'd also like the option of being able to hide pictures from my home page as they do take time to load every time I visit and sometimes all I want is to access menu items. But I would want them to show on the day the results were announced and I wouldn't want to have to keep switching it on and off - maybe an option to show ribbon winning photos on the day results for that challenge are announced only?
OR could it set up that the menu items (and submenu items) are loaded and functional before the images are loaded? Which would solve my issue and be much easier!
OR could it set up that the menu items (and submenu items) are loaded and functional before the images are loaded? Which would solve my issue and be much easier!
The menus are only displayed "last" because of how browsers "work". JavaScript does not start executing until all of the images on a page are loaded, and that it just the ways things are.
The worst offender of this sort of thing (IMHO) are people who post images in their signatures in the forums hosted on non-DPC sites. If these external sites are ever slow, or unreachable, it prevents the navigation menu from ever appearing.
In terms of "slow load time", once the thumbnails for the challenge winners have been sent to your browser one time, they are cached locally and are not actually re-sent over the network. The browser just checks to see if the thumbnail has changed, and if it hasn't, uses the image it already has on disk.
OR could it set up that the menu items (and submenu items) are loaded and functional before the images are loaded? Which would solve my issue and be much easier!
The menus are only displayed "last" because of how browsers "work". JavaScript does not start executing until all of the images on a page are loaded, and that it just the ways things are.
The worst offender of this sort of thing (IMHO) are people who post images in their signatures in the forums hosted on non-DPC sites. If these external sites are ever slow, or unreachable, it prevents the navigation menu from ever appearing.
In terms of "slow load time", once the thumbnails for the challenge winners have been sent to your browser one time, they are cached locally and are not actually re-sent over the network. The browser just checks to see if the thumbnail has changed, and if it hasn't, uses the image it already has on disk.
Thanks for that explanation. I just find that the homepage here at DPC is one of the slowest pages to load of the sites I visit regularly. I wish there were a way of loading the menus first but as I'm not a programmer I don't know whether that is feasible in light of your comments about javascript.
PS Images in signatures don't seem to me to be such an issue (though, clearly, looking at my own, I'm biased) because people have a preference option to turn those off AND they are not part of the main page - they come into play only when loading a specific thread.
The menus are only displayed "last" because of how browsers "work". JavaScript does not start executing until all of the images on a page are loaded, and that it just the ways things are.
Of course, if we switched to using some Javascript that worked in other browsers (like Opera) then things would be even better!
For the "My Home" page I would like an option to turn on/off the various things. Specifically the challenge results. Though it'd be nice to be able to choose from a variety of things of what you can or don't include for the "My Home" page.
There is an option on the preference page. You can turn on and off "show my score".
