We've been watching the use of widgets all across the web - in blogs and in traditional website - and an occasional question pops up regarding performance and whether a widget will slow down the display of a page. There aren't a lot of resources on the web that do a good job describing the situation and providing suggestions. Nial Kennedy has a fairly technical post on widget performance. The only really useful information is reduce total network requests - which basically means put multiple blocks of javascript into one file and multiple blocks of CSS into one file. This post about using fancy javascript to create widgets is on the right track, but really is meant for widget developers rather than widget users. Other sites that talk about web page performance actually have an incorrect understanding of how to achieve good performance, so I won't link to them here.
However, there are several tools that can help you see what your blog page performance is and provide a starting point to determining what to change - if anything. This full page test tool from Pingdom is very cool. It visually shows you all the files that a browser would load when someone views your site and gives you the actual download times.
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