ProjectX Technology

Rankr is back with fresh data. We’ve been having data problems with Alexa’s base data not updating their own system. It seems Alexa is OK for now.

Xlinks is a digest of interesting links from internet that ProjectX staff have found in the last week.

Atomisation of Conversations
Added on 05/19/2008 at 10:40AM
20 ways to fix Google Analytics
Added on 05/19/2008 at 10:38AM

Yahoo and Microsoft back at the table
Added on 05/19/2008 at 10:36AM

UK Shops secretly track shopping habits by mobile phone
Added on 05/19/2008 at 10:35AM

Facebook chat powered by Erlang – scales to 70 million users
Added on 05/19/2008 at 09:13AM

YAWS vs Apache – performance test
Added on 05/19/2008 at 09:12AM

YAWS – Yet another webserver
Added on 05/19/2008 at 09:12AM

Performance Testing Data Delivery Techniques for AJAX PDF
Added on 05/19/2008 at 09:11AM

Why Generation Y is going to change the web
Added on 05/16/2008 at 10:35AM

Web performance – Splitting your payload:

There is more push to make your javascript load on demand
Added on 05/16/2008 at 09:40AM

Firefly – chat with people on the same site
Added on 05/16/2008 at 09:30AM

Shuttleworth calls for co-ordinated release cycles
Added on 05/16/2008 at 09:28AM

Google releases Flash API for maps
Added on 05/16/2008 at 09:26AM

GPS crimefighting in US
Added on 05/15/2008 at 12:50PM

Nokia sees half of cellphones with GPS
Added on 05/15/2008 at 12:49PM

Build your own fonts
Added on 05/14/2008 at 12:34PM

Can you catch up on lost sleep
Added on 05/13/2008 at 03:38PM

Cuzillion – Shows how webpage performance is affected by script loading
Added on 05/13/2008 at 12:20PM

High performance websites part 2 book coming soon
Added on 05/13/2008 at 12:04PM

Teaching Kids Programming by Nat Torkington
Added on 05/13/2008 at 12:02PM

My post on NZ Homepage Hall of Shame has shaken things up. I’ve had a number of emails and comments on the blog. A number of sites are now actively looking at improving their page architecture.

Update: A proposal to add web compression to the e-govt webstandard ! Great news.

Kudo’s to New Zealand Herald and Vodafone for taking action and improving their pages. Their numbers now are:

I’ll be doing another audit soon to profile the rest of the sites.

In the we still haven’t learnt from our past mistakes files…

Just saw this post Software takes you to infinity and beyond on stuff. I thought that the worldwide telescope looks awesome and proceeding to download it. I thought to myself I’ll get my mother in law to install it for her grandchildren in India. And then I got to the download page and here’s what I found.

6 steps with dependencies and warnings about turning off security. There’s no way I can get my mother in law to install it. Its too complicated and too painful!

If you’re going to release software aimed at families and children then it needs to be easy to install!

I’ve just found this article about global pages sizes, its confirms some of the figures that I posted about the average size of homepages in New Zealand.

It seems that we are below the global average of 312K. The scary thing is that its grown from a 93K average in 2003! And the number of external files (JS, CSS, images) for a webpage has nearly doubled.

From the article.

“So the increase in the average speed of broadband has more than kept pace with the increase in the size and complexity of the average web page. That is one reason why broadband users expect faster response times. Yet narrowband users have experienced slower response times as web page size has increased.”

The article has some good info on, growth of media files, image sizes and average web page characteristics.