YSlow ShootOut will be a new feature, each Wednesday, where I will look at a few competing sites and how they stand up to YSlow’s scrutiny. While I am not sure it necessarily translates to any real value in terms of SEO rank or customer retention or conversion, it is always a good idea to try to speed up your site if you can.

This week’s contestants are Social News Sites! Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Fark, Hugg, and YCombinator, come on down! [read more]

There are a lot of different types of hosting. You can use shared hosting, a VPS, or a dedicated server. You can use Windows or Unix. You can use Apache or IIS. You can use something more off-the-beaten-path. But one thing remains the same. At the bottom, underneath all those details, there is still a server and that server connects to the internet, probably by ethernet.

So what does this commonality mean? Well, it means one very important thing. There is a top speed of hosting. [read more]

This plugin has been revised to be the Atropos WordPress plugin, which provides a better interface. Please upgrade and use that one instead.

The ExpirationDate plugin lets you set a deletion date for your posts (and pages).

To set an expiration date, you add a custom field called “Expiration Date” (no quotes) with the deletion date as the value. The date should be in YYYY/MM/DD format. [read more]

Another month, another popular list to analyse despite the lack of much change. midPhase and its sister-site ANHosting traded places more or less. StartLogic popped back onto the list and 1&1 departed again. BlueHost still owns the top and Yahoo! still floats around the bottom.

It is interesting to note that two of the top hosts (DreamHost and ThinkHost) are both “green” hosts, powering their servers and operations with wind and solar power. It could be that a Prius effect is spreading into the hosting world as well. If you’re looking for green hosting, other choices that pop to mind are HostPapa (wind and solar), AISO (solar), and GoGreenHosting (wind). SingleHop also puts a stake into the “green” space, but from the direction of making their data center use less energy rather than buying cleaner energy.