For those of you who use bravenet.com as your hit counter, I notice that some of you don't have the image sized in your HTML. If you put in an image in a page, with no size, the page will delay the load until it gets the image, because it doesn't know how much real estate to allocate it in the browser display.

If you add the parameters "height=xxx width=yyy" where xxx is the image height in pixels, and yyy the width, as parameters to the "img src=..." tag, you might be able to get around the bravenet delay, even when bravenet is down. For instance, if you "view source" on my code, you'll see that my tip bucket is explicitly sized, so that the page loads quickly even if Amazon is slow in responding (which it occasionally is).

Unfortunately, I don't know the size for the Bravenet hit counter myself, but if you can find the image somewhere, and load it into a graphics program, it will tell you the size.

The (smallest) one that almost everyone uses:
height="41" width="38".

I just swapped over to a different counter until bravenet gets straightened out.