I’ve temporarily removed the BlogAds network ad serving code at Wizbang, as the BlogAds domain is unreachable from several portions of the Internet. An informal survey of bloggers shows that some can access blogads.com, while others cannot.
If you’re running BlogAds on your site your pages may be subject to excessively long page load times for some readers. As with all such observations, your mileage may vary, but it’s worth noting that if your readers can’t reach the BlogAds site your pages will timeout while they try to load your site…
Update: One possible answer to what appears to be an uneven outage is that they (or one of their upstream providers) are a victim of the LA blackout.
Update 2: They were not hacked, as is claimed here. A visit to the Pressflex domain indicates the company has always been based out of Hungary.
Final Update: Henry Copland of BlogAds tells me the problem is related to a DNS change entered incorrectly. The change has been corrected, but it takes a long time for the corrected entry to propagate throughout the Internet. This explains why some people are able to get to the site, while others are not. The BlogAds weblog has more details (if you can get to it).
They were slow yesterday, too, but got slower right as the blackout hit.
BlogAds always slow down whatever page they’re running from.
I removed them from my page for the same reason – but it seems to be spotty (from my location) – some pages are loading them fine and some are hanging up. Not sure what is going on.
It’s all Bush’s fault. He is in bed with the Halliburton/Enron/Tyco/WorldCom internet ad service and purposefully blacked out southern California to pump more ad money into his pocket. I also heard that Karl Rove was the electrician in Burbank… developing…
Could someone throw me a link to an English translation of Kevin’s post and most of the comments above? I need a clue. Really.
I’ve learned to click the “stop” button before the page timesout. You get everything but the unavailable ad.
Give it a tencount, if the page isn’t up, click stop. Works like a charm.
If you switch the design so the blogads code loads AFTER your content…you’ll never have to worry about possible slowdowns. For Wizbang, that would mean swapping the main content with the sidebar.
I never have a problem with blogads. It doesn’t slow down my site at all.
Someone should probably tell Jordan that his post makes him look like a complete idiot (who uses blogads and doesn’t know that the company name is Pressflex?) and he should take it down or at least retract part of it.
Rob: Great tip! I had no idea what the “stop” button could do, just tried it on several slow-to-completely-load sites (Wizbang rarely slow for me, Captain’s Quarters always painfully slow) and it did just what you said. Many thanks.
I love the media going crazy about the blackout.
It’s not a big deal. Californians are used to blackouts, we just make do until the power is restored. The company figured out it was their employee and fixed things.