Recent Internet Issues: Using external resources

Over sometime now, using external resources on your web page has been quite common. Whether it be using an analytic package, loading jquery from the Google servers, or even loading an image from a partner company, there is an issue.

The Issue

Since you are calling an external resource, you are relying on that service to be up. A lot of these places, especially companies like Google seem to have great uptime and are very reliable. However, I have noticed the "Waiting for ........." while waiting on a page to load. How many times have you waited on the content of page to load, only to have to wait on adsense to load before the rest of the content. In my opinion, this is not the fault of Google, or whomever external resource you use.

A Possible Solution?

So what is that I propose? I propose you load external resources at the end of the page and use either javascript or css to position it correctly. On kreitsoft.com I ran into this issue when loading my last tweet. So, I ended up using javascript to load the tweet into a div. The div is positioned using css. Twitter is notorious for having downtime in the past, and would it be fair to make a visitor wait on loading your last tweet? If I wouldn't wait on my own pages to load my last tweet, why should I expect others to wait?

This way, YOUR content will be loaded prior to waiting on your ads, tweets, or tracking software. While someone might want their ads to load quickly, I want the content of the page to load even quicker. If I see your page get hung waiting on a 3rd party resource you just lost a visitor and I will go to a different page.