Spent some time last night cleaning up under the hood. More work to be done (mostly because some changes had unexpected consequences so I held off on doing them) but the website should load a lot faster now.

Initial loads (for new visitors) should have gone down about half (for me, from 15 seconds to 8 seconds) and the same for subsequent visitors (again for me, 8 seconds to about four). Your mileage will vary because speed depends on where you are in the world, but hopefully this makes the site more usable in general.

One of the side effects I haven't come up with a perfect answer for is removal of some widgets I like but that are really slow - the Google Translate was itself about a second of latency, and the Twitter feed widget was about three seconds of latency by itself! These should be the only visible results of the tweaking though, the rest is behind the scenes improvements.