Greener Desktop

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.

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Just a brief note to mention that Webslug now has some new features.

• Paging of fastest and slowest site lists. Now you can find out where your site sits
• Fastest Browser list. How compare Chrome vs Firefox. Actually it seems as if it’s faster
• Fastest operating systems. It seems that Mac is quicker to load web pages. Who would have guessed that Win98 is the slowest?

That’s it for the moment. If you’re interested in what’s coming up for Webslug, check out the TODO list.

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.

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I’d love to say I added ads on Webslug because I’m a poor web “artist” who needs a hand out, but this is not the case. I did it to see if anyone actually clicks on them.

I notice an awful lot of tech sites, especially utilitarian ones like Webslug, with ads on them. I don’t believe that your typical user of these types of sites has any interest whatsoever in clicking on ads. Not because they’re bad people but because they are there for something else. To use the site.

The second thing I wanted to look at was the relevancy, or lack thereof.  Webslug itself doesn’t have a huge amount of content other than URLs and  numbers. I thought it would be interesting to see what Google adsense made of it.

The ranking system for fastest and slowest sites has been upgraded. Hopefully it should improve the quality of the results.  The number of tests for each site has also been added.

Additionally a bug with the battles table in IE for site summaries has been  fixed. No more javascript errors.

Over the last couple of days I’ve added some more features to Webslug and fixed some bugs. The following has been added or fixed:

• RSS feed for the latest tests now available
• Contact form for feedback/questions and help updated
• Link to this blog added
• Some filtering of the fastest and slowest sites to alleviate problems caused by IE returning a false positive speed test and to make it fairer on sites that have only had a few tests performed
• The battles tab (google as an example) had a small bug and some battles won by a site were showing up as lost. This has been fixed.

Thanks to all the people who have provided feedback and used the site. Remember to support it by linking to it and telling all your friends.

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…)