Damn You, Blogger. Damn You!

Kiko's House is a distinctive current events blog that, as is the case with many thousands of other blogs, relies on the good graces of Google and its freebie Blogger software.

That said, a fair number of people wanting to visit us have a dickens of a time opening the door to Kiko's House and stepping inside once they get to the front steps.

After consulting with other bloggers and my technical advisor (see photo), I have concluded that the problem is two-fold:

(1.) Kiko's House uses a lot of visuals and will continue to do so. This is one of the things that makes the blog distinctive. But this creates a problem for older and slower computers because they must upload each image and that takes some time in an era when instant gratification is the coin of the computing realm.

I try to be careful about what images I use but goofed bigtime last Saturday when I uploaded a massive image of the surface of Mars taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It was a fabulously detailed photo, but I had to delete it and the accompanying post a day or so later after belatedly realizing I had made an existing upload problem worse.

(2.) I am fond of saying that if Bill Gates made cars, they'd all be broken down on the side of the road and Microsoft would be bankrupt because of chronic problems with Windows. I am beginning to think the same thing about Google.

Like I said, Google's Blogger software is free. And while I'm reluctant to look gift software in the mouth, too often Blogger is slow or has stalled altogether, meaning that not even I with my hyper-fast Internet access can post to the blog, edit posts or read your comments.

This is the major reason for the slow loading and non-loading. Blogger is utterly unreceptive to the complaints of myself and fellow bloggers in the same predicament because we're very small fish in a huge pond.

All this by way of saying that I apologize for the problems.

If Kiko's House continues to be as popular as it has been in the first four months (we've been visited by folks in 53 countries at last count), that cat and I plan to fly to Vegas, divorce Blogger and get our own Website.

Until then, please try to be patient.

And if you use antique versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator or Mozilla, please consider downloading Mozilla's terrific Firefox browser, which seems to load Kiko's House faster. You can do so for free here.

-- Best wishes, SHAUN MULLEN