Jason Kaneshiro of BlogHerald has written up an interesting post that describes the amount of de-cluttering posts he’s seen published around the blogosphere. In this particular post, Jason describes some of the ways he has de-clutered his own blog. From cleaning up the CSS code, to uninstalling and removing plugins, to digging into PHPMyAdmin to optimize the WordPress database tables. Jason seems to have covered the gamut, in terms of cleaning up his blog.

When Web 2.0 first began with Google and Craigslist, one of the “innovations” was simplicity itself – empty, uncluttered designs that allowed users to get what needed to be done with a minimum of design elements.

I feel this basic concept has been forgotten recently, what with widgets, ads, videos, monetization, polls, spam, and splogs. Some blogs are so obscured with extra stuff that the content – the post itself – is nearly impossible to find.

It may be time to get back to basics.

As for myself, I don’t think I have overloaded the blog just yet. I’ve come close, but have been able to stop myself before it was too late. In all honesty, unless you the reader feels differently, I don’t think I need to do too much in the way of cleaning. I wouldn’t mind performing those database optimizations and I think I’ll see what I can do to clean up this theme and it’s associated CSS code. Perhaps I can substitute a few more images with CSS colors.

The biggest impact on loading time is from having third party widgets displayed on the blog. The page will only load as fast as those sites that the widgets are pulling data from. I’ve already removed the Google Analytics code from the site because at times, it was causing the site to hang. I’ve thought about removing all of the third party widgets on this site and replacing them with local WordPress plugins that provide the same functionality. However, I can’t convince myself to remove the THREE widgets in the sidebar.

What are your thoughts on the whole de-cluttering issue? After reading the article up above, do you feel the need to rethink your blog and go back to basics? If so, how do you plan on achieving that goal?

Also, I’d like to know if you think my blog is too cluttered. Does it load too slow for you? Is there too much crap getting in the way of the content?