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Microsoft Redesigns
The new Microsoft Corporation site actually looks decent. Highly optimized markup. There’s gotta be a good story behind this, it’s a complete reversal for Microsoft. Scoble? Hat tip: Doug. Be sure to read the comments.
Giving Credit
Codex Guidelines
Codex Guidelines, some tips on writing for the new WordPress wiki. (Not “live” yet.)
Net::MovableType
WP Tag Quick Reference
WP Tag Quick Reference, also known as “WP Tabs.” Neat work.
Feed Searches
Like Milk
“I’m gonna treat you like milk and spoil you.”
WP on Subversion
Thanks to the generosity of Jonas, we’re rocking and rolling with Subversion for source control in WordPress. Working on restoring some of the old services and getting all the developers up to speed with it.
Slash Happy
Slashdot linked to Browse Happy (an excellent project beautifully designed by Ethan, by the way) but what makes it interesting is that I host browsehappy.com. The bad news is I had to bump MaxClients to 800. The good news is after the initial bump (settings too low in httpd.conf) it’s running along just fine. 🙂 And then it got huffy when I went to dinner.
Unusually Enthusiastic
“WordPress seems to be supported by an unusually enthusiastic group of developers” I suppose that’s one thing to call us. 🙂
My Templates
My site page on the new wiki has near live versions of a few of my templates. I can add more if anyone is interested. They aren’t the best or cleanest, but they work and it’s what powers what you’re reading now.
Book Hooks
Opening Hooks, a collection of literary beginnings. Cool idea. Have a look.
Feedster DeGoogled
Why Feedster was removed from the Google index. Doh! Hat tip: Phil.
Redemption in a Switch
Chu Yeow switches to WordPress and has an interesting story. Welcome to the family. 🙂 “I can imagine how the rebuilding frenzy brought the server to its metaphorical knees. […] being able to read and understand the source code of WordPress is a very, very uplifting feeling. It makes me want to contribute as a developer.” I dig the way his comments are set up.
Google Newsletter
Sign up for the Google Newsletter, the
Google-Friends mailing list is powered by groups.yahoo.com.
Get Custom
Get Custom plugin, easy interface to WordPress’ infinitely flexible custom fields system.
Matrix Reloaded Cup
On Milk
I didn’t realize how fast time passes until I started buying milk.
Search Engine Markshowdown
I decided to run the web page analyzer (excellent tool) against the front pages of a few of the latest and greatest search engines and also do a little analysis of my own. Here are some of the results in one of the only tables you’ll ever see on this site:
Feedster | Technorati | Yahoo Search | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
HTML | 6.11 | 3.72 | 1.18 | 7.82 |
Ext. CSS | 11.47 | 11.63 | 0 | 1.45 |
Other | 9.10 | 6.70 | 15.10 | 1.72 |
Total | 26.70 | 22.05 | 16.27 | 11.00 |
Compressed | No | No | Yes | No |
Numbers are kilobytes, and may not add up exactly due to rounding. CSS is external, linked files. “Other” includes images and javascript.
Yahoo was the surprise winner here. Their HTML was alright but I think could be reduced quite a bit without losing anything. You’ll note they have the heaviest HTML of the bunch, heavier than other sites showing quite a bit more on their front page. They should probably talk to Doug. Overall though I think Yahoo has consistently been doing great nearly-standards-compliant work in their new designs. Yahoo could save about 67% of their HTML size with compression. Interestingly, Yahoo was the only site to specify ISO-8859-1 encoding, all the others claimed UTF-8.
Google was optimized to the hilt, but it’s kind of silly that they put so much effort into their markup but couldn’t go the last inch and make it valid HTML 4. They could probably make it a bit smaller with some more intelligent CSS usage. At least they don’t have font tags anymore. I think under normal circumstances they would have won but they have an olympic logo right now that’s pretty heavy. Google was the only site that used gzip compression for their HTML, but even uncompressed they only weighed in at about 2.4 kilobytes, still the lightest of the group.
Technorati clearly had the smartest markup of the group, and was the only one that validated. (An impressive feat for any website in this day and age.) Their markup is clean as a whistle with excellent structure and logic, and their numbers aren’t bad when you consider that they have a lot of stuff on their front page. This isn’t too surprising since Tantek did it. Their CSS, however, is pretty heavy. It’s strange because it’s very optimized in some ways but bloated in others, I think they could cut a few K from it pretty easily. One smart thing they did is have the CSS named with the date, so it’s name versioned and they can update it monthly without caching issues. All that said, they’re so far ahead of everything else they don’t need to worry about much. Technorati could save about 53% of their XHTML size with compression.
Feedster has its heart in the right place, but the implementation falls far short. For example it has a XHTML 1.1 doctype
but then has the needless XML declaration at the top throwing IE into quirks mode. They use CSS in places, but then they have a table with 75 non-breaking spaces in it for positioning. There’s a ton needless markup, including a full kilobyte of HTML comments. On the bright side, they have the most room to improve. Feedster could save about 61% of their XHTML size with compression.