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#1 Twitter Mistake (video)

Unknown Webmaster — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:42:11 GMT

A couple of days ago I stumbled across a very interesting video that offers a lot of insight on Twitter (and Hollywood wannabe celebrities).

This is a 5 minute video from Chris Pearson. I think it is awesome. He starts talking about Twitter 1 minute in.

Chris Pearson: Video on Twitter fame

Recently I added a bunch of people from PAL on Twitter, and to my absolute horror some of you have added me back:eek:

This has somewhat ruined my plan to just sit unnoticed in the corner spying on people, since there are now people staring right back at me...

The #1 Twitter mistake
Whether you use Twitter for fun or profit, you probably want followers - lots of followers. You want to become famous.

This isn't the Hollywood-movie-star-kind-of-fame, however, it is still very usefull.

Chris Pearson, author of my favorite Wordpress theme, Thesis, has made a fantastic video about What Hollywood celebrities wannabe celebrities do wrong and it involves Twitter.

Go watch Chris Pearson's 5 minut video on how to become a celebrity

Multiple browser testing made easy

Unknown Webmaster — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:22:33 GMT

Right now 1 out of 5 visitors to your site may not see it the way they are suppposed to.
This is because some of visitors (curse them) are using old browsers.

See how your site look in old browsers
(it is free)

The standards of the web are continually changing as new technologies get introduced and old phased out. Today we can do all kinds of fancy stuff on our websites that we couldn't do just � year ago.

This continuous development means that the way that a particular website is shown in an old browser such as Internet Explorer 6 is very different from the way it is shown in a new browser such as Internet Explorer 8, since the new browser is using new standards that didn't exist when the old browser was developed.

Circa 20% of the population are using IE 6 or another ancient browser.

This means that if you haven't tested your site in IE6 your site may be unreadable by 1 out of 5 visitors.

This is the ACID2 test. It is made to test whether or not a browser is showing websites "according to today's standard".

ACID2 in up to date browser

The ACID2 test shown in Internet Explorer 8 :)

ACID2 in Internet Explorer 6
Your site could look like this

Internet Explorer makes the smiley look like it has been put in a blender - Happy Smiley isn't happy.

See if your site looks like a blended tomato on
browsershots.org
(it is free)

Examples of image optimization for websites

Unknown Webmaster — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:26:55 GMT

Examples of how you can reduce the size of your images and the load time of your website with smush.it

If you haven't read my first post on image optimization with Smush.it I recommend that you do so before reading this one. You don't have to, but it will tell you

Example of image optimization with smush.it
Imagine that this is you logo

Your logo is being shown on every single page of your website, and a reduction in filesize could be a big improvement on your website as a whole.

This is your logo after it has been smushed

As you can see there are no difference in the visual quality. All that has been changed is the way the image is saved. And the smushed image is 8% (2.8 kb) smaller than the original. Now, this was just a single imgae, lets see what it can do with a whole page.

Real life example - RakeTheRake
I have installed the smush.it Firefox plugin and are imagining that I own RakeTheRake. I have gone to http://www.raketherake.com and are looking at the bottom right of the browser window.

All you have to do is press the smush.it button as shown above, and you will be sent to a smush.it page that analyze the pictures and display the results.

I can't show all the results since it would break the design of the PAL blog. However, I can tell you that 20 kb of the 40 kb bloat comes from a background image. :)

Website optimization video
This is a video on website optimization and best practices from one of the creators of Smush.it - Nicole Sullivan. She talks about why it is important to optimize your website and gives some advice on how to do it. Be advised: The video is of a talk to designers and webdevelopers, so if you don't enjoy those kind of things you may just want to skip the video and add my RSS feed to your newsreader or try smush.it on your website smush.it!.

Nicole Sullivan: "Design Fast Websites" @ Yahoo! Video

Easily reduce the size of your images with Smush.it

Unknown Webmaster — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 04:56:05 GMT

Smush.it is a free online tool that let you reduce the filesize of images on your website with the press of a button - litterally.

When a user visits your website it is because they want something. You are probably getting a lot of different visitors, and while some are looking for "poker bonuses" others my be looking for "naked poker dealers". What nobody wants is to sit around waiting for your pages to load.

You may not think that it matters whether your page takes 0.1 second or 0.3 seconds to load. However, you are not like your visitors. The average person doesn't create websites and do online marketing, and a whole lot of those "normal people" aren't Internet addicts like you and me. They don't have a fast Internet connection, and as a result they may have to wait up to 1-2 seconds for your page to load.

At this page Smush.it reduced the size of the images almost 50%

So, how do I reduce the size of those images?
You may have heard about different filetype, and that each of them are good for something particular. JPEG is good for photos, GIF is good for simple images like logos and PNG is basically an improved version of PNG, allthough some of it's transparency doesn't work in older browsers.

By changing how an image is saved, you can reduce the filesize of that image, and thus making the pages it is shown on load faster, without reducing the quality of the image. However, testing 3 different filetypes for every single image on your website is of course pretty tedious work.

Fortunately a couple of friendly webdevelopers has made a nifty little tool that does most of the work for you.

Introducing Smush.it
Smush.it will try out the different formats for you, tell you which one is best, and lets you download it. You can either do it by uploading an image, submitting a list of URLs
or downloading the Firefox plugin

It is free and litterally doesn't take you more than 1 minute. You may want to use the smushed pictures, or you may not think that it is worth the bother. But if your website is twice the size it could be, wouldn't you at least want to know about it?

Try smush.it now

Chicks dig Flickr images for free commercial use

Unknown Webmaster — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 03:36:09 GMT

...and you should too, because if you want chicks (and other people) to read your articles, you should to make them as appealing as possible.

Before I tell you how to find the images, a word of caution: Even though a picture may be appealing in itself, you should always make sure that it sets the right mood for your article. Some pictures may be inappropriate for your website and could even portray it in an unprofessional manner.

Photo by Stinkie Pinkie

So, how do you find those pretty pictures of hot asian girls covered in mud that you can use free of charge?

Well, all you have to do is to go to Flickr and use the advanced search function as shown below.

And scroll to the bottom of the page where you can filter your search, so you are only looking for photos under a creative commons license that can be used commercially.

While the pictures are free to use, you should make sure to check the license of each picture, since you may be required to attribute the picture to someone or may not be allowed to edit it.

While Flickr has a wonderful selection of photos to choose from, there are unfortunately some niches that are still lacking in material :(

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Character count tool

Unknown Webmaster — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 07:09:07 GMT

I couldn't remember the URL for a character count tool...

One thing led to another, and I ended up spending friday night trying to figure out how to get javascript and a textfield to behave like I want them to while still validating as XHMTL 1.0 strict.

After 6 hours of masochistic adventures with the Javascript API and the XHTML documentation I gave up and found a tutorial that fixed things in 5 minutes. :mad:

Well, at least I can remember the URL for the damn thing
http://www.unknownwebmaster.com/charactercount.php