Recently we added a new section to our web site evaluation report - page size. Why is this important? Because you have less than 10 seconds to make an impression on a visitor and if your page isn't showing something by then, you may well lose a visitor because they clicked on to something else in the meantime. It's rough out there! Our attention spans aren't what they used to be.

While researching page size and speed issues, I came upon a little script which will measure and report the speed of your site. It's called - what else - Site Speed! This nifty program measures how long it takes a web page to load. It requires PHP and can be loaded to track any kind of web page (HTML or scripted), and it's available for both Linux and Windows hosts.

http://www.numion.com/SiteSpeed/index.html

I've installed it on our home page and it's been tracking for a week - there are a few results to look at, anyway. If you click on the little N icon at the bottom of the page, it will bring up our stats. 

I'm in the process of restructuring a site for a client, and one of things we're changing is the content of the home page. He wanted to have current news articles displayed along the right side. So I went searching for a program to display an RSS feed, and here's what I found:

http://apptools.com/phptools/xml/rss.php

It's a nice, simple script in which you set the URL of the feed, include the file in your program, and away you go! It took about 5 minutes to set it up. It will take longer to customize the look and feel of the feed, but I thought it was really easy to set up. And it looks pretty good coming out of the box, too.  

After poking around on the site a little bit, I found some other interesting stuff… Dreamweaver Password Recovery, and a script to create a dynamic site map. Neat!

Today I found a great article about how to do your site maps correctly. It depends on the size and structure of your site, and the article  suggests strategies that seem good. I'll be checking out some of the software as needed for different clients, and I'll post the results as they come in.

Today I stumbled on one of the best web applications I've ever seen! It's an online image editor and it's as good as or better than many commercial software products. One really neat thing is your choice for loading images… you can upload a picture from your hard drive, use a web image, Google search, or you can enter a web page address and have every picture on the page available for editing. Very cool!

http://www.cellsea.com/java-cellsea/media/index.htm

Recently I did an evaluation on a site that uses Flash, and the only validation errors on the page were due to the way Flash was embedded in the page. So I went looking and found this excellent page to show me how to make it work properly:

http://www.ambience.sk/flash-valid.htm

The nice part about the way this is done is that if a person doesn't have Flash, images will be shown instead. You can use this to great advantage, so your site is accessible to people who don't have Flash. It's so important to offer alternatives to all of the modern bells and whistles so people who are a little behind or using special software can still use your site. You don't want to turn away potential customers!

I've known for a while that PHP can create images, but I didn't know until recently just how simple it is. I used the technique to display fancy shadowed text (example) and also to make the number of customers under the logo dynamic. I learned how to do it from the PHP docs. You can make images which have a plain background or you can use another image as the background.

Another sample of this nifty ability can be found here, where I've listed the available fonts. Our favorite CAPTCHA program lets you choose which font you want to use so this little script is very handy to see what the fonts look like. Neat!

One of the first things to do when cleaning up a site is to set the proper "Document Type" in the web page. This is what tells the browser what version of HTML to expect within the document, and it's important because it specifies which standards the page is following (or not). I found a great page which details the available document types and how they are handled in the different browsers:

http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/

Probably not real useful for the general public, but you geeks out there may find a use for it when you're working on designing standards-based web pages.

Here's a great resource - a technical support person's list of best freeware programs:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best_46_free_utilities.htm

If you need high quality, free tools to manage your computer (and who doesn't?), check out this page for useful info and links to some of the best free utility programs out there. Also check out some of the other sections of the site for more free resources to help run your computer better, faster and more securely.

Recently I've been working on a project involving a security service named ScanAlert, and it got me thinking about some of the ways web pages can be protected from scumbags with evil intent. One method of protecting forms on your web site is called captcha, where you have to type in some sort of code before submitting a form. This ensures the data is being submitted by a person rather than an automated program. Why try to weed out the programs? People will try to do as you instruct, so you can usually tell what they're going to do. Programs, on the other hand, can be malicious, stealing data and or sending out spam, among other things. So it pays to prevent abuse of your web site.

I've been able to try out several captcha solutions using PHP code - I had to use different programs because the first program I got didn't work on an older server. The second program worked very well on the older server, as I was able to tweak the settings to make things work. You can see the different solutions in action here:

First program: Desert Harvest
Second program: Pat Criscito

We'll be offering this as a service in the very near future because spam and abuse of this type will only grow as the hackers and cheaters get more sophisticated in their craft. We're growing and learning, too - learning how to shut them down!