Performance Research, Part 1: What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests:
"The conclusion is the same: Reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on reducing response time and is often the easiest performance improvement to make."
Uhoh, while I've been thinking of and coding various small utilities that i can place in my already full side bar, it seems the very opposite is true for improved performance. Oh well, its not like my blog is business critical so I guess I'll keep adding features to my sidebar.