Wow, thanks for the quick feedback.  These are pretty much all good ideas, I'll try to implement some of them tonight. 

As far as the smoother and more intelligent web coding goes, the extent of my skills runs currently to the late nineties.  You're lucky the whole thing isn't a thirty page description of my cats, with a static background image that clashes with the text contrast and a midi of Queensryche's "Silent Lucidity" playing on a loop.

Re: the hangups, could be one of three things: Cherrypy is occasionally telling me it ran across some sort of error with static files, my vnc viewer into my server is set to "bandwidth hog," and I had bittorrent open.  The latter two should be fixed, so let me know if it continues to happen.