[edited to replace second with minute because I'm a moron]

GNB has been slow to load for years.

Literally.

At some point in the past someone told me "it's because we're not active so it's on a slow server" and I believed them.

This morning I got an email from Jesse Wendel (aka, the boss) asking if there was anything I could do about how slowly the We Fight On image loads.

I'm not really a web guy, but I did a quick search on how to time a website and it turns out the Safari Develop tab Web Inspector will tell you how long each thing on the page you're viewing took to load.

All I had to do was load the page (endure the 1+ minute load time) and open the inspector.

And it wasn't the We Fight On image and it wasn't the server.

It was a css file called 'ft.css' which was trying to be loaded from a specific IP address -- at which it was not, apparently. It caused an average delay in load of just over a minute (which doesn't sound like a long time, but it really is).

I found out how to see the source of the page in Blogger (it's in the themes section) and did a quick search for 'ft.css', commented out the line that was loading it, did the same for 'counter.js' for good measure (it wasn't nearly as long a delay but it wasn't loading, so why try?).

And the page is fast.

I'm sorry I didn't dig into this years ago and save anybody looking at the page a lot of time.

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