Here is our entry to the GeoSpatial Mash-up competition.The purpose of the competition was to demostratewhat different visualisations could be achieved using maps and data from the Stats dept. like census data.
The theme for our mashup is that we chosen to show the number of recorded offences for every 10,000 residents across New Zealand.The mashup show the number of crimes highlight by colour over the different Police regions across New Zealand.
The Mashup is built on top of Google Maps API and KML. Unfortunately it highlights some of the problems in visualising data using KML. Anytime we wanted to change the shading of the polygon we had to load another entire KMZ file. This is not the best approach in building a lean mapping application.
This highlights one of the problems with KML and provide an opportunity for us to introduce Tardis – our mapping visualiation tool. We’ve built Crime 10k Tardis version using flash, to highlight how much faster and interactive visualisation can be.
We get a lot of traffic from search engines. So we spend a lot of time optimising our SEO and our site to make sure we have as much content in the search engine index.
When it comes down to the hard numbers of referrers, 98% of our search engine referrers come from Google and only 2% comes from Yahoo. (We have about the same number of pages in both indexes) Even though Yahoo is now powering the search for Xtra, the return for us is still so low. We’d rather spend our time and energy optimising SEO for Google we get far more return.
I’m sorry Yahoo, you don’t deliver the traffic to make it worth our while keeping our index fresh. As a result of poor click return, we restrict the rate that Yahoo crawler can access our site. (Not that they pay attention to robots.txt !) That way Google has more of our CPU cycles and bandwidth to crawl our site.
We apologize for the excess traffic to your site. In a continuing effort
to improve our index freshness and comprehensiveness we are bringing
online additional crawler machines to prepare them for production.
To limit the amount of traffic your site receives, you can place a
crawl-delay in your robots.txt, specifying the number of seconds each
crawler will wait between each request. Please check out the following
pages for detailed information about this:
Thanks Yahoo for answering my question. NOT </rant>
The Velocity conference on web performance and operations is in full swing there are a wealth of information in the slides.
Here is a selection of the most interesting presentations:
AOL PageTest – AOL have created an opensource tool call PageTest to test performance on IE 7/8 and they have created a online page test to show the performance of your website from East coast USA (Slides)
High performance Ajax application – Yahoo. Another awesome slide deck from the Yahoo performance team. (Slides)
Improving Netflix performance – Mesuring and testing performance at Netflix (Slides)
Larry and Sergey, articulated this philosophy in Ten things Google has found to be true. One of these principles is “Fast is better than slow.” We’ve found this rule to be especially applicable to the landing pages of AdWords ads. When a user clicks an ad, a landing page that loads quickly provides a better user experience than a landing page that loads slowly.
So here’s the rub.
Starting today, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids).
Now that your Google ads monies at risk, there’s never better a time to speed up your pages.
We’re lifting the lid on some functionality that we’ve been working for a while to make it easier to browse content on ZoomIn. For the first release (currently in “Garage Mode”) we’re focusing on browsing photos. So now you can look at all of the photos around any location, as you zoom and pan around the photos will constantly update.
To get the browse photos explorer either click on explore photos on the home page or search for any address or place and expand the results box to reveal the Explore photos link.
We have two modes of browsing Photo bar and Thumbnails.
Photo Bar style
Browse the photos via the photo bar.
Thumbnail style
View all of the photos on the map.
Explore Photos is in Garage mode, which means we’ll be tinkering and improving over the next few weeks.
We appreciate your suggestions and feedback, so let us know what you think.
Firefox 3 has been officially released and looking under the hood it has been tweaked for faster page loading.
Here are the key connection values in Firefox 2 and 3.
Attribute:
Firefox 2
Firefox 3
Max Connections
24
30
Max Connections per server
8
15
Max persistant connections per proxy
4
8
Max persistant connections per server
2
4
As we can see the maximum number of connections and number of connections per server has been increased. So that’s good news for more parallel downloading. And they’ve also increased the number of persistance connections so that future requests will be a bit faster. Another interesting thing is that http pipelining is turned off by default.
So far Firefox 3 has been snappier and more memory efficient! Download Firefox 3 today and squeeze a bit more performance from your bandwidth!
Here’s a look at some ZoomIn traffic from last Sunday. The video was based on the realtime visualisation of ZoomIn using the glTrail tool by fudgie.org. (They also make the awesome gltail tool)
