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Google – Websites downloading speed and sales

We all know that downloading speed is important but we have always underestimated it’s importance else all our sites would have been Google. All Google products render faster compare to its competitor. Google head really understands the value.
Mayer of Google

According to Marissa Mayer (VP, Google) at Web 2.0 Conference

“Part of Google’s secret sauce is that a round trip for a search query that returns a result in .05 seconds touches 300 to 700 Google machines across the country. Users really respond to speed”.

In simpler terms

  • Every 100ms delay costs 1% of the sales. (Data taken for Amazon)
  • Every 500 ms delay costs 20% traffic. (Data taken for Google)
  • According to two surveys, conducted by Forrester Research and Gartner Group, ecommerce sites are losing $1.1 to $1.3 billion in revenue each year due to customer click-away caused by slow loading web sites.

More statistics

  • The average time a user wants to wait for a page to load is 8 seconds give or take 2 seconds! That’s a very short time.
  • Akamai and JupiterResearch have recently released the results of a survey in which 1,058 online shoppers participated. According to the survey,
    1. Poor site performance leads to customer dissatisfaction.
    2. Brand perception is diminished by poor site performance.
    3. Site pages should load in four seconds or less.
    4. Customer loyalty depends on quick page loading

    This survey offers a lot of good points. Get a full version of the survey.

Full Page loading vs Progressive HTML Rendering
Firefox renders the table in a progressive way but Internet Explorer loads the complete table at once. If I get time I will write more about it (Do let me know if you have queries). The following images will help us understand the difference (Credit to codinghorror.com for the images).
Progressive vs normal rendering

This is optimized page
Better rendering for pages

Some tips for faster rendering

  1. Tableless designs to support progressive rendering.
  2. Using CSS files to use the local cache. The CSS files are cached in local machine and used there after for faster rendering. Use a http watcher to understand this.
  3. Reduce the non visible content as much as possible.
  4. Others: Avoid heavy flash files, heavy images and other obvious factors.

I will write one small Google trick later. Google is loosing the battle to win the war, that is another trick for faster rendering (I will write when I get some more time, force me to write earlier).

SEO Advice
Faster rendering can help in SEO indirectly, ask me if you have doubts.

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Using subdomain’s folder using htaccess

I was using http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/ as my blog url for various reasons. Yesterday I added a subdomain blog.aimk.org (aimk.org is added as an addon domain with dns hosted with idealwebtools.com but the site hosted with a different hosting company. I have done it to host inferno.aimk.org with idealwebtools.com), which takes the same folder public_html/blog/.

http://blog.aimk.org was just a redirect to aimk.blogspot.com so I could tweak the .htaccess a bit and make it work. (I could have also done this by troubling by hosting company to add few lines to the http.conf, which I avoided as I could handle it).

What is done?

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond % ^blog.aimk.org$ [OR]
RewriteCond % ^www.blog.aimk.org$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.aimk.blogspot.com [R=301,L]
(rest of the wordpress htaccess for cleaner url)

Some Tweaking for inferno.aimk.org
http://www.inferno.aimk.org and http://inferno.aimk.org (without www) both exists, now we will do few htaccess tricks to redirect www to non www subdomain.
RewriteCond % ^www.inferno.aimk.org
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://inferno.aimk.org/$1 [R=301,L]

It is simple for one who knows and difficult for others :). Enjoy

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Simple Keyboard tricks for Website Browsing

One of the key to success is time optimization. Creating more than 24 hours in a day is not a possibility except on Oct 28, where you get 25 hours a day. But improving the effectiveness of the 24 hours can help you create more hours within the given 24 hours. I was doing this small keyboard trick when I came to know that some of my colleagues did not know this, so I thought I should share it with all. These are really simple tricks

Here are some of the keyboard tricks for faster browsing (works only in Firefox). Type google and press Ctrl+Enter to add www and .com to the domain. This trick also works in Firefox, which has shortcuts for “.net” and “.org” as well:

.com -> Ctrl+Enter (works in IE too)
.net -> Shif+-Enter
.org -> Ctrl+Shift+Enter

Here are some other links for keyboard shortcuts

Enjoy the shortcuts for faster browsing.

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Making template tableless

You must have noticed some changes with the template. I have removed few tables as to make it load faster. I had three tables in my previous template,

  1. Top header table
  2. Rest content table containing main content and leftmenu
  3. Main content table

Now the problem was with IE where the head table used to load faster and rest of the content which was contained in (2) used to load at once after a break. With a slower Internet connection this could make people feel that the page is without any content. So I decided to study some css and make it work through css. I also removed a lot of designing stuff to keep it simple. I need to work more on it but I am busy for next couple of days. For CSS I read the following links

I will be working more on the template to make it even more simpler. Please let me know your opinion about the change.

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Some server handling with yum

I am not an expert in server handling but I am learning and every small thing adds more dimensions to brainosphere. I found yum really cool as it makes life very simpler. If “Yum” sounded like a chocolate brand or a chicken brand to you then I better do some documentation.

Yum (Yellow dog Updater, Modified) is one automatic updater and package installer (and package remover) for rpm(the baseline package format of the Linux Standard Base) systems. Yum automatically computes dependencies and figures out steps to install packages. Manual updates will take everything out of you but yum makes it easier to maintain groups of machines without having to manually update each one using rpm.

We are using CentOS (Community ENTerprise Operating System) which is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. We use Yum to manage the packages.

I will just write about how to get a package from CentOS-Testing repository.
Two links which will help you understand about repositories

  1. http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories
  2. software-management-concepts

To enable the CentOSPlus repository, edit the file /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo and look for the [centosplus] section. Here is how it looks by default:

#additional packages that extend functionality of existing packages
[centosplus]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Plus
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=centosplus
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/centosplus/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=0
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4

Just make enable = 1 to use the centos-plus and to enable CentOS-Testing repo please add
[c4-testing]
name=CentOS-4 Testing
baseurl=http://dev.centos.org/centos/$releasever/testing/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://dev.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-testing

Hope it made some sense and I am sure you will like to explore following links

  1. Managing software with yum
  2. Yum Man pages
  3. CentOS wiki
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Upgraded to firefox 2

Meanwhile I have upgraded to firefox 2 both at home and office. The most attractive feature is an in-built spell checker. I needed it much as I keep writing blog posts (official and unofficial ones) without using a spell check. It helps me with forum posts. I think on an average I write more than 25 forum posts and firefox is helping me with spell checks. GREAT FEATURE for me.

Also it is to care about phishing using Safe Browsing technology currently available in Google’s Toolbar for Firefox. I am get to test it properly. It is very much needed but will it be proactive enough. I wrote about Paypal hacking but now I see that most of these pages are giving 404. They must have shifted those paypal look alike pages to a new center.

Certainly I can see some improvements for RSS feeds and I am liking it. Also there is some improvements with tabs. Some good improvements.

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MSN launches linkfromdomain operator

I know I am little slow to offer the info but here are some indepth to it as a compensation for the delay.

What is linkfromdomain operator?
Check this MSN page (click here), it tells you about the outbound links or outgoing links or external links from a domain. In simpler words, “to how many external (other domains) webpages are your domain linking to”. The above mentioned link will tell you that idealwebtools.com links to slashdot.com , digg.com and many more domains.

Is it important?
Yes, it is important. Some 3 years back people use to feel uncomfortable with outgoing links and some even called it a PR leakage. That was the era when PR was everything but now things have changed. And with Blog the outgoing links are very much a part of our culture. If you do not link to any external website then your domain will be called the dead corner of Internet. Internet defines link as the way of communication among various entities of web and it is advised not to have a dead end site.

Does it help in good ranking?
There has been many debate on this issues across various forums. IMO it does help, link to good and relevant neighborhood. Linking to expert webpages also help. I am not the one whom you can catch for tidbits of SEO, so that’s all to this paragraph.

Here are some more tips with operators

  1. link: Are you aware of link:www.idealwebtools.com? This will tell you the total webpages linking to http://www.idealwebtools.com or http://www.idealwebtools.com/index.html .
  2. linkdomain: Here is another operator which will tell you total inbound or incoming links to all the pages of your domain linkdomain:idealwebtools.com (I do not think this is documented anywhere).
  3. linkdomain: -site: This will tell you how many external incoming links do you have for your site. See the result (works in yahoo only, MSN is not giving me the right results)

Using these combinations you can do a few experiments. Even though MSN is offering something new but IMO MSN is still sick. 

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Land laws vs Google (GYM) laws

Laws make you behave accordingly. I was reading a topic at webproworld where ignorance (some trick without purpose) could have attracted some penalty. Google (in general GYM, Google Yahoo MSN) laws differ from Land laws.

Land Laws : Let no innocent person be punished. Leave 5 criminals to save one innocent person. Every life is important.

Google Laws : Let no spammer (WWW criminal) go unpunished (or rank in SERPs). Let 5 innocent sites die while punishing a spammer. One site makes no difference.

Understand GYM laws and be careful with any spamming techniques. Ignorance is not innocence here. In case you are about to get a punishment please refer to this document http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/reinclusion-request-howto/

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Why programmers are Lazy and Dumb

It sometimes hurt for sure. I remember an incident when my boss asked me to arrange and check few mysql tables and arrange them in excel. I told myself, “oh God, it will take atleast an hour and such a hectic work. I will do a small program for it”. It just took me almost 3 hours before my boss shouted at me for being lazy and over possessed with programming. I finally did it manually but realized that I am really born lazy and thus an artistic programmer. I love programming and I can spend hours and days to see a final product smiling.

The first paragraph was to say that almost all programmers are Lazy and Dumb. I also want to share an amazing article on this topic (Philipp, this is one my fav blog post), http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-08-24-n14… 

We had some incidents when our programmers were smart and ended up with laugh.

We programmed for IP telephony with Asterisk (the open source PBX) and the set various options, option 1 to talk to consultant and option 2 to something and so on.
One customer shouted at our customer care, “Why the hell do you need to do a blood test for counseling?, bloody option # 5“. We relooked at the option and it said press 5 for podcasting (lol).

Another incident. I asked a customer, “Tell me your Internet browser and then I will be able to help”. Customer, “I have a PC, if you can tell me how does a Internet browser look like then I can tell you”.

A programmer certainly needs to be dumb and ask all the dumb question to make the program really simple. I am lazy but failing to be dumb and working very hard to be dumb.

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WordPress and PHPlist – Jesse heap helps

After finishing my work on wordpress single user 2.0.4 and making it a multi user I wanted to work on phplist. I really like the work that is done and I have forwarded it to all whom I knew for testing. Hedir.com has implemented it and are happy about it. I know I need to make a post for it. You can find some of the features at Hedir.com (including a demo blog). Many could not believe it yet. Few people told me that its not possible as a team of professionals must be working at mu.wordpress.org to make it a multi-user and how could you overtake them in just a day. I have done and am very happy about it. Keeping myself humble I must say that its the experience that helped me do this. I will surely write and show you how it works.

I was very excited to integrate phplist with wordpress. I was studying the code and was not very happy with the standards. I delayed phplist integration and thought of using an existing package. I did a Google to find http://docs.phplist.com/IntegratingPhpListWithOthe… . I thought of trying http://www.jesseheap.com/projects/wordpress-phplis… and applied the plugin within the sidebar. It did not work. I was tired with weeks hectic work and wanted to avoid debugging and I contacted Jesse Heap.

(I am putting the mails in blog as it will only do good to both of us)

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