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The White House visitors database contains notes about meetings with lobbyists, members of Congress and celebrities including Hilary Rosen, left, John Boehner and Oprah Winfrey.

A scrub of more than 2.2 million entries in our new White House visitors database yields a steady stream of lobbyists with access to the Obama administration, as T.W. Farnam reports in today’s editions.

Farnam examined the visitors logs (which you can search here) to examine how often registered lobbyists are given access to the White House and surrounding executive offices. He found frequent visits by lobbyists such as Marshal Matz (lobbyist for food and agriculture interests), Bill Samuel (AFL-CIO) and Nancy Zirkin (Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights).

But the logs also capture the ordinary (and extraordinary) pulse of the presidency, from state arrival ceremonies to bowling alley tours, from presidential meetings with members of Congress to Hollywood celebrities. Below are details on some of the more interesting visits we found, and a guide to exploring the database on our site.

VIP VISITS

President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner meet in the Cabinet Room of the White House on July 23, 2011. (Jewel Samad - AFP/Getty Images)

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has made 23 White House visits since December 2009, including 11 amid intense negotiations over the federal debt ceiling in July 2011. By comparison, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has visited at least 64 times since 2009.

This year’s regional Emmy nominations are in, and The Washington Post’s video team received 12 nominations for their work this year. The Emmy-nominated video work ranges from general assignment news (“The Chess Grandmaster”) to large projects months in the making (“Remembering the Shuttle Era”, “Following the Dreamers”).

The regional Emmys are from the National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter.

The Emmy nominations are the first for video journalist A.J. Chavar, who joined the Post in 2010. Chavar is nominated for three video projects, including “A Catalog of Grieving,” “On Leadership: MicroManagement Stories,” and “Remembering the Shuttle Era.”

“I’ve only been out of school for two years so it’s really cool for me,” Chavar said. “It’s an honor.”

The nominations come on the heels of the White House News Photographers Association awards where Post journalists received multiple awards for their work.

We’ve all been there. You open a Washington Post link from your mobile phone and then … you wait.

And you wait.

And you wait.

And maybe the link finally opens. Or you give up. Or maybe, for some unlucky Android and Blackberry users, the link crashes your phone’s browser. Yikes. Not our idea of a great reader experience.

Today, we’re rolling out the first step in a long line of mobile Web improvements. If you click on a link for which we have a mobile-friendly page, we’ll point you to that quick-loading page instead of our desktop Web site.

We hope this small change gets you closer to the content you want when you want it. If you prefer to get the desktop Web page instead, click on the link illustrated at left. We’ll store your preference for the desktop Web site in a cookie, so you don’t have to keep choosing this option.

What’s next?

If you’ve noticed that the Washington Post Web site has been loading faster lately, you’re not the only one.

As noted by media Web site, Poynter, SEO and PR strategist Adam Sherk recently compared the speed of various news organizations’ homepages and found that the Post Web site page speed rating has improved 32.4 percent over last year.

Regular readers of the Post likely remember this column by Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton. In it, he detailed reader frustrations with the Post Web site.

Screenshot of the Post's homepage.Now, according to Sherk’s analysis, the Post’s homepage is as fast as other sites such as The Economist and Mashable and ranks higher on the list than the likes of The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

As the Post’s Chief Information Officer, Shailesh Prakash noted on Ask The Post earlier this year, site performance has been a priority for the Post’s developers.

Have a burning question for Wonkblog’s Ezra Klein? You can go here, where he’ll be answering your questions throughout the day.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. Kevin Clark/ The Washington Post.In addition to introducing an interactive tool that predicts the 2012 elections, Klein has already weighed in via Reddit on everything from where the “hip wonks” hang out in D.C. to his soup preference (read: he only eats soup from cartons).