Web Performance, Branding, and Social Media
In my presentations and consultations on Web performance, I emphasize the importance of a correctly configured DNS system with the phrase: “If people can’t resolve your hostname, your site is dead in the water”.
Yesterday, it appears that the large anti-virus and security firm Sophos discovered this lesson the hard way.
Of course hindsight is perfect, so [...]
Port80 Software is reporting that in their survey of Fortune 1000 Web sites, IIS 6.0 has overtaken Apache as the Web server platform of choice. [here]
My two-cents: I respect the Port80 Software team greatly and love their maniacal devotion to ensuring that IIS users actually make use of the HTTP compression and caching that can [...]
In: smp
14 Sep 2005Bob Wyman of PubSub has a great post on the value of online consistency to companies and services. [here]
This is a critical component that is too often overlooked. The need for speed is an addictive goal. But as I have said before, fast is not enough.
Go, Bob, Go!
In: smp
29 Aug 2005Well, it was bound to happen. Someone from a PR Agency asked if I was willing to go on the record today to discuss the GrabPERF results for the site they represent.
This exposes the critical weakness in my plan for world domination. I am, effectively, providing a low-octane sub-set of the information that my employer [...]
In: smp
21 May 2005If you thought this was bad, SAP strives to exceed its previous level of obsfucation.
Nicholas Carr quotes from the transcripts at the Boston SAP Sapphire conference.
Let’s look through this thing. Remember we had the fridge. We decided to retire the fridge. We’re going to talk about a new metaphor from now on. What is NetWeaver [...]
In: RANTING
27 Apr 2005Some software called “Netscape” has a critical flaw. Never heard of it…
In: smp
8 Feb 2005Why, oh why, does Windows suck?
I wish I knew…
Off to install my 87 new critical security patches…still haven’t gotten an offer from anyone to ship me a WiFi enabled Linux Laptop, or a PowerBook for testing and “paid” blogging purposes…
eBay woke up. What a concept! A real person answering your e-mails. Now, of course, the downside of this is that the e-mails will be answered in Bangalore and Mumbai, and will still be from controlled response scripts.
But still, it’s somewhat of a concession from eBay that they stumbled a bit…and that the response to [...]
In: smp
6 Jan 2005In writing the last post, I was thinking about what factors go into making the Web performance of a site "excellent". What defines in the minds of the sites users/customers/visitors/critics/competitors that the performance of a Web site is excellent?
These are usually judged by the standard factors:
Usability
Responsiveness
Availability
Traffic
Reliability
Security
Clarity
But within the company itself, how is the performance of [...]
In: smp
6 Jan 2005Jeremy has added more on his firing (here).
I am going to burn my bridges with more than a few potential Canadian employers by saying that this does not surprise me at all from the Canadian management mentality. In some ways, it is still stuck in the Victorian era: paternalistic and vindictive. My interviews with Canadian [...]