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Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

Just wrote a couple of Ezine articles

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Hopefully 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.

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Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

Another Webslug update - getting bored yet?

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

More 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.

(more…)

Posted in Web Development, Webslug | No Comments »

Updated: New feature roundup for Webslug

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

It’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.

(more…)

Posted in Web Development, Webslug | No Comments »

Chrome is slower than Firefox

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

Well 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.

(more…)

Posted in Interesting, Uncategorized, Web Development | 28 Comments »

Real Popular Update

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

Real 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.

Posted in Interesting, Web Development | No Comments »

Really really popular news

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

My 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.

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

Updated: Webslug featured on Ajaxian

Monday, July 14th, 2008

Webslug ScreenshotWow. 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…)

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Posted in Web Development, Webslug | No Comments »