Greener Desktop

Wow. That’s all I can say after the “blogosphere” lit up last week when Ajaxian featured webslug as the “hot or not of performance websites”.

It’s amazing the amount of buzz, both computer and people generated that a respected blog like Ajaxian can generate.  Before I knew it webslug was number one for the term webslug on Google and Yahoo, up from about ten.

Here’s how the traffic went (note that the site had about 50 unique sites tested before it was featured on Ajaxian):

• Post + 1 hour – About 500 unique sites
• Post + 18 hours – About 2000 unique sites
• Post + 36 hours – About 4000 unique sites
• Post + a weekend away in the Blue Mountains – We’re now at about 7800 unique sites and climbing

Like most of the work I do Webslug was looking like a build it and let it fade into obscurity site but it seems as if people may actually find this one useful. With that in mind I’ve decided to dedicate some time to improving it. These are the features I’ll get in, in the next couple of weeks:

• Now live - Contact form – nothing worse than not being able to give or receive feedback
• Now live – RSS Feed for the latest speed tests. This will be followed by an individual RSS feed for each of the sites so webmasters can keep track of the number of tests done on their site
• Direct test linking eg http://www.webslug.info/www.smh.com.au for example
• Badges or modules for sites with stats on their performance and a link to the feature above
• Improved filtering of bad results. IE will kickoff a successful load event even if a website can’t be found for some reason. This is contaminating the top sites list with sites that don’t exist.
• Better quality of slowest and fastest sites list. Not just the fastest or slowest in absolute numbers but a ranking based on the number of tests done etc
• Paging on the slowest and fastest links so more sites are exposed
• Google adwords (yeah yeah I hear you say but if it pays to keep the site running then don’t complain)
• Bug – Battle results tab on view. I think these are showing a loss as a win and vice versa as google.com seems to have a lot of losses
• Need to push people through to the site view page when they run a single test or a battle
• Comments on individual site pages
• Bug – Better filtering on bad IE tests. Already removed the XSS attack (attempts), now need to remove examples like – http:1harines.com

If there’s any feature you’d like to see on the site just leave a comment.

No related posts.