YSlow by Yahoo! is a great little plugin for Firefox and Firebug. It looks at a page and uses Yahoo!’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site to tell you how to make the page load faster. At least that is the idea behind it. In practice, however, not all of its suggestions are useful or even meaningful.

Let’s break it down and see what is worth the blood, sweat, and tears, and what is not. (Read more…)

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…)

So, I got my email this morning. This site is a BlogRush member no more. I’m not all that broken up about it. It was nice to get a little traffic that way, but I am getting more eight times as much traffic from wordpress.org than from BlogRush, so I’ll certainly live. (Read more…)

By now everyone should know the ubiquitous RSS icon with its orange gradient and white arcs and circle. It is a standard that can be fit into just about any website design with some appropriate color modification. And yet there are those who feel they know better. They replace the standard with their own RSS icon, whether it be a variant of the original or something completely different. Here are some of the worst offenders. (Read more…)