Microsoft quietly released Internet Explorer 8 last week without the usual fanfare that goes with a new Internet Explorer release. With that in mind reviews have been fairly slim on the ground but that’s not surprising. The fact of the matter is that the latest incarnation of IE just doesn’t bring much new to the table. The major improvements according to Microsoft’s own web site are around catching up with Firefox and the other web browsers in the areas of security and privacy and some minor UI additions to make browsing a bit better. Which I must say are quite nifty but definitely not ground breaking with most features being available through various third party plugins.
Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category
Just wrote a couple of Ezine articles
Thursday, September 25th, 2008Hopefully they’ll have some SEO benefit for Webslug. I’m trying to optimise for the keyphrase “website performance“.
However, Google seem to be penalising me still. The vast majority of traffic for Webslug comes from blog referrals and direct (bookmarked) visits.
Anyway here’s the articles:
- Increase your website performance for fun and profit – part 1
- Increase your website performance for fun and profit – part 2
I’m really getting quite desperate. It’s a good idea, at least I think so and a lot of people are missing out. Fingers crossed it helps.
Another Webslug update – getting bored yet?
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008More feature(s) added and an update on SEO.
Firstly, it seems as if Google in its infinite wisdom has decided to penalise Webslug based on, what I think, is the number of outgoing links. Some of them probably to questionable sites. All outgoing links to unknown sites have been updated to include the rel = nofollow attribute. Hopefully Google will pick this up and start sending traffic back.
If you’re a webmaster the moral of the story is – don’t hand out links unless you know who they’re going to. If you’re a fan of Webslug please help restore its ranking by linking to us.
Updated: New feature roundup for Webslug
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to do anything on Webslug but now there’s some new features to expect in the next week. Including:
- Fastest/Slowest browsers and operating systems. If you’ve read my post on Chrome we’ll see how well it really performs now
- Paging on slowest and fastest web sites. This will open up a whole heap of rankings for people and of course webcrawlers to find more sites
- Site summaries. I’ve been wanting to add this one for a while. Still to be decided what will be included but at the least there will be an excerpt from the site and potentially some whois info to go with it.
Chrome is slower than Firefox
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008Well now that Chrome is out and the dust has begun to settle I thought I’d spend the time to test it using Webslug (a site I designed that does site performance comparisons).
I had been chatting to a few of the engineers at work and of course they were raving on about how fast it was. I didn’t agree, it seemed slower to me. Noticeably slower. So I pulled out Webslug and gave it a go.
Here are the results of testing two sites. One quite media rich and the other very spartan (Yahoo and Google, who else) and guess what, it’s slower than Firefox.
Real Popular Update
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008Real popular - the social news aggregator aggregator has been progressing slowly. I’ve been trying to do it the “right” way so it can be expanded upon easily in the future. Expect an initial, fully functional release within the next couple of weeks. After that I’ll be looking at adding the following features:
- RSS feeds of the most popular stories … and chronological feeds so you can decided which you prefer
- Mobile content page. As this site is mainly targeted at a specific kind of user … i.e. me, I’d like to be able to browse the most popular news from my mobile phone. No, there will be no iPhone specific page
- Login system so you don’t lose all your favourites when you switch browser. Hopefully openid enabled as well
- Most popular video and photos. To start off with they’ll be modules on the home page but eventually they may make their way into the main content or their own pages
Keep an eye on this page and the real popular social news stories at http://www.realpopular.net.
Really really popular news
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008My next big (depending on how you define big) will be a popular social news aggregator. It’s called Real Popular.
I like reading Digg, Reddit, Buzz and many other social news sites so I thought I’d bring them all together. Even better I thought I’d add some social features to the social news aggregator. They’re yet to come. For the moment please enjoy Real Popular – bringing you the best social news.
Updated: Webslug featured on Ajaxian
Monday, July 14th, 2008
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): (more…)