ProjectX Technology

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I have just been looking for a book on Amazon and I have noticed that they have added a new option to their buying process (only seems to be on some of their books) – “See all buying options”. This allows you to look different prices of booksellers from around the world.

Wow! Is this the long tail in action? Amazon aggregating books from around the world, so I can shop around for the best price. At first glance this looks great, I can select the book from the seller close to me. The reality is now I have more work to buy a find the best priced book. I have to check all the sellers for their shipping options, shipping costs and delivery times and figure out total cost of the books. Hmmm, what about returns, do I have send it back to the seller, or to Amazon , more work to find out! What a pain in *! 

Ok, Ok I am whinging, but with good reason. I loved the fact that I could just use one click shopping and everything just worked.

So how can they fix it?
First, they should extend their onclick buying to include shipping costs. This would allow me to make a real comparison between sellers.
Second, what about enabling me to sort the list of sellers by total price (+shipping) and or delivery times to my 1click address.

That would proper comparison shopping without the work!

I suppose this is a reminder that new features aren’t always good for all your customers. By adding new features, you might alienate some of your customers, who are happy with the current options. Frustrated and unhappy, your customers may start to look elsewhere. This is another example where customer driven development would be more beneficial.

I’ve just been talking to a client and I thought I should remind everyone that you all should be using httpd compression on your websites!

HTTPD Compression

What is it ?

HTTPD compression is used to compress delivery of web content from the server to the browser. Typically httpd compression delivers compressed HTML, CSS and XML files. There are compression modules for all the major webservers.

Why compress?
If everyone is shifting to broadband, whats the point. The reality is the most people are still on modems or on crappy ISDN connections. By compressing your site, you make sure the site is fast and snappy for all your customers. Customers are accessing your site from all over the world.

How fast is it?

It depends on the file hit ratio of your site. On the auction site that I used to run, about 80% of the hits were images and remaining 20% were HTML, CCS and Javascript files. But suprisingly in terms of Kilobytes size transferred the Images only made up 48% and the text a whopping 52% . So 20% of the hits translates into 50% of the data being transmitted to the browsers.

Compression savings is anything from 300-500% depending on the size of the file. That represents a lot of time saved for your users.

What are the benefits ?

1. Bandwidth saved: You would save at least 15-30% of your bandwidth usage. Bandwidth costs are expensive, so any saving is a boon!
2. Speed up HTML rendering: The HTML page loads first, but compressing the page you can speed up rendering by 2-3 times. Snappy delivery is absolutely important in improving the user experience.
3. Its easy: There are many modules that are easy to add.
4. Its Free: There are plenty of free modules for Apache and IIS.
5. It works with all browsers: IE4 and above, NS4 and above, Any Mozilla , Opera !

Who’s using it?

Finally, a number of the big sites are starting to use it. Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Trade Me. . You can check out pipeboost to see how much they are saving.

Resources

• Pipeboost – An easy way to when the effectiveness of compressing your pages. Paste in your links and see how much you can save.
• Andrew King’s Site – The book “Speed up your site” started it all for me. When I read this book I felt sick that I had never implemented this before! That was 18 months ago, and I still surprised that EVERY website isn’t compressing their content!. Make sure you don’t make the same mistake!

BONUS TIP:
You can use the websiteoptimization tools to check how big all of the components are.

We’ve been having some problems with comment system on our blog. I upgraded to version 4 of Typo.

What a mission!

Big tip, you need to run “rake migrate RAILS_ENV=production” to sort out the migration errors.

Its working properly now and I have switched to a new theme. Not sure if I like the colour scheme, but it nice to have a proper side bar.

ProjectX is one year old today.

We’ve had a lot of highlights.

• Aug 2005: Set up ProjectX in John’s apartment, start working on a number of ideas.
• Sept 2005: Moved into a temporary office, and hired our first staff member – Nick.
• Oct 2005: Launched ZoomIn
• Nov 2005: Released ZoomIn Mapping System to the public.
• Dec 2005: Tomek joins ProjectX
• Jan 2006: Map guru Ross joins ProjectX
• Feb 2006: New Maps release.
• Mar 2006: New version of ZoomIn with user added content and added Aerial Photography.
• Apr 2006: Launched ZoomIn Australia – ZoomIn.com.au website.
• May 2006: Launched Australian ZoomIn Mapping System
• Jun 2006: Ben keynotes at Where 2.0 2006.
• Jul 2006: Release of ZoomIn Mapping System v7 and Smaps website.