In one of our previous posts  we’ve already covered the topic of <a href="http://blog.monitor.us/2012/05/best_blogging_platform_review_wordpress_blogger_-squarespace/” target=”_blank”>choosing the best blogging platform by comparing well-known software by comparing wordpress, Bosinglogger and SquareSpace. Let’s check out some other, different blogging platforms. They’re the most popular of the so called “micro-blogging platforms”. The micro-blog typically has smaller content than the regular one – it can be just one sentence, an image or a video link.

Tumblr

<img class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-5669" title="tumblr" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/f7a3a_tumblr-150×150.png” alt=”" width=”150″ height=”150″ />

The well-known platform for micro-blogging – Tumblr, is focused on short and frequent posts. It’s somewhere in between writing in a blog and posting to <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter. Using Tumblr you can expand the content that you share on social networks and drive some extra traffic to your website.

Pros

• Easy-to-use. Tumblr is really simple – with a few clicks you can upload photos, text, images, and audio and video in short, quick posts or lengthier ones. Setting up and customizing is easy too and you can start blogging a few minutes after you sign in.
• Option for audio blogging. Tumblr comes with many outstanding and interesting features like free custom domains.
• Community. Tumblr’s community shares a lot of content and the users interact with each other – the reason that some people call it a social network, not a blogging platform. If your business is relevant to Tumblr’s users, you can create content that they will share and it may well spread to a lot more people than you intended at the beginning.
• You can use content, created by others. Just because Tumblr has some characteristics of a social network, you don’t have to constantly create your own content. You can share items related to your business content that others will enjoy. This way you’re indirectly informing potential customers of your business and you stay in touch with them.

• Links with social networks and third-party apps. You can sync your Tumblr account with <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook and/or <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter so that you can update your social media feeds in a single location. Tumblr also offers support for many third-party apps such as google Analytics.

Cons

• Not so customizable. The point is that bloggers focus more on the content itself. Compared to other platforms the list of themes is quite short. You can upload your own picture and set it up as a theme though. There is a list of premium themes, but they’re paid.
• Sacrificing some freedom. You don’t have so much control over formatting of your posts, themes and other options – freedom that the more advanced platforms offer.
• Not so good mobile applications. There are a lot of mobile apps for Tumblr which you can use on your device. But it seems that every one of them is missing something. The official Tumblr app is not so well developed – some of the other apps offer more functionality than it does. So posting on-the-go is not as easy as it should be.

Posterous Spaces

<img class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-5671" title="posterous-logo" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/f7a3a_posterous-logo-150×150.png” alt=”" width=”150″ height=”150″ />

Posterous Spaces is another popular micro-blogging platform that is a social network as well. It’s really similar to Tumblr and in spite of some differences between them you can achieve the same goals and results for your business with either platform. Which one you choose is really a matter of your own personal taste and feelings about the platforms. Posterous can also be integrated with your business <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter profile and <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook page.

Pros

• There’s nothing short about your posts. Despite the fact that it’s a micro-blogging platform, you can write posts that are as long as you wish, with attached images and video.
• Advanced email-based blogging. It’s not an option that everyone uses or likes, but you can do almost the same thing as posting, by yourself, with a single e-mail – attaching images, videos etc.
• Excellent control over privacy. You can create “spaces” for people to follow. You set up permissions for every space, so that you can choose who can read your posts. For example you can have a space for public posts, for your private blog, or for a group of your loyal customers.
• Free mobile apps for iOS and Android. You can post easily on-the-go and your blog has a mobile-friendly version, so when a user goes through your posts on a mobile device, the site automatically renders for it.

Cons

• Paid custom domains. When you log into Posterous it creates a YourName.Posterous.com blog for you. If you want a custom domain name, you have to pay for it.
• Not so many themes to choose from. The only good thing about themes is that you have a lot of customizing options after choosing one – you can change the colours, pictures etc.

Jux

<img class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-5673" title="jux_showcase_your_digital_life_logo" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/2d4cd_jux_showcase_your_digital_life_logo-150×150.png” alt=”" width=”150″ height=”150″ />

Jux lets you create your own micro-blogging site for sharing your content. The platform is similar to Tumblr and Posterous, but looks more professional and is more marketable. A lot of micro and small businesses have chosen this platform for their blogs. It’s an excellent choice when you’re willing to share more visual content and artwork on your blog.

Pros

• You have the options that are needed to create a unique site.
• You can add your google analytics.

Cons

• No mobile posting ability. Not even with an e-mail. And it looks like it won’t have a mobile app soon either.
• It’s more concentrated on sharing visual content. So if your business is not in a sphere that is related to a lot of visual content, this is definitely not your platform.

Now you’re wondering, “which one should I choose?” or “should I choose a typical blogging platform like wordpress or Blogger?”. In fact, the question is really how much time and effort are you willing to invest in your blog. If you want something simple, attractive and time-saving, something that you can run during your coffee break, micro-blogging is for you. If your business is dealing with a lot of pictures, you can attract more attention to it with micro-blogs. But if you want something more sophisticated and complex, don’t go with micro-blogging.

Go to Source

Earlier this week we <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/05/14/top-10-<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook-winners-losers-countries/”>studied what countries around the world had lost and gained the most <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook users over the past 6 months. With <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook going public today, we thought we’d take a quick look at where the social network has the greatest potential for growth.

So we posed this question: what if <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook had the same penetration in Africa and Asia as it does in Europe and North America? How many users would the social network have then?

The numbers are pretty staggering.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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Exascale computing is the next frontier in the world of supercomputing. While the performance of current supercomputers is measured on the petascale (computer systems capable of producing performance over one petaflops), exascale computing represents a thousandfold increase on the petascale.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

This week’s suggested reading about exascale computing

IBM to build exascale supercomputer for the world’s largest, million-antennae telescope :: ExtremeTech

IBM and ASTRON, the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy, have announced that they have begun work on building an exascale supercomputer that will collect data from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a 3,000km-wide telescope that will have millions of antennae. The current world’s fastest supercomputer, the K, has 700,000 processor cores and a peak performance of 10 petaflops — an exascale (exaflop) computer would be 100 times faster than that.

It will store “300 and 1,500 petabytes per year.”

A New Era in Computing: exaFLOP computers :: Data.cr

A new age in computing is almost here and we will see machines that perform at least 1,000 times faster than today’s most powerful supercomputers. According to experts, by the end of the decade, exaFLOP computers will go online announcing a new breakthrough in scientific invention. Powerful countries and regions such as the United States, China, Japan, the European Union and Russia are all investing millions of dollars in supercomputer research. The EU recently announced it was doubling investment in research to $1.6 billion.

The new arms race.

Another big obstacle to exascale computing: resilience :: GigaOM

Los Alamos National Laboratory is trying to build to an exascale computer, which would be 1000 times faster than Cray’s Jaguar supercomputer and could process one billion billion calculations per second. The man in charge of executing that vision, however, sees a big obstacle toward building a computer with 1 millions nodes, running between 1 million to 1 billion cores. That problem is resilience.

It’s got to be up and running, silly.

Exascale apps pave way to supercomputing greatness :: Nvidia

“It’s time to get serious about what we’re going to do to make sure we have applications ready for exascale systems,” said panel moderator Mike Bernhardt, publisher of The Exacale Report. He suggested that the race to exascale is likely to be won or lost based on how well the software industry optimizes its applications for massive parallelism.

Makes sense, software and hardware has to go hand in hand.

Intel to push MIC aggressively for Exascale computing :: VR-Zone

Remember Larrabee, Intel’s big time attempt to get into the discrete GPU business? Well, it may have failed in this respect, but the core architecture was transplanted to another market segment that would welcome its approach – high performance computing. After all, the idea of using a simplified – in this case, Pentium like – core as a front end to a big, wide SIMD FP engine, and multiplying that by over 50 times on a single die with a high bandwidth interconnect between the cores, and also high bandwidth external memory connection alike that on GPUs, does make sense for a number of technical and scientific computing jobs. And, why not, top end gaming physics too…

Imagine how gorgeous the latest FPS game would look on an exascale computer <img src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/a453e_icon_smile.gif” alt=”:)” class=”wp-smiley” />

The supercomputing race :: The Washington Post

What does leadership in high- performance computing mean? The U.S. Council on Competitiveness has said that “to out-compete is to out-compute.” In its 2008 report “The New Secret Weapon,” the council concluded, “Supercomputing is part of the corporate arsenal to beat rivals by staying one step ahead on the innovation curve. It provides the power to design products and analyze data in ways once unimaginable.”

This is from 2011, but it’s still a very good read.

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We have previously covered the about choosing the right <a href="http://blog.monitor.us/2012/04/shoestring-budget-<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook-ads-vs-google-adwords/” target=”_blank”>online advertising platform and talked about how to <a href="http://blog.monitor.us/tag/<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook-ads/” target=”_blank”>set-up and run <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook ads.In this post, we will be concentrating on the world’s most popular online advertising tool: google Adwords: it’s best practices and nuances and also the ways to achieve the best results with it.

Since Adwords has started, a lot of people have tried it out but many still question if it is worth it. The answer to that question is as simple as the question itself, and yes! google Adwords has been responsible for revolutionizing the face of many companies, often times just overnight. That question that many have when beginning and Adwords campaign is the cost that should be incurred to get a great amount of traffic but the golden rule is the more you are ready to invest, the better results you will receive.

In the beginning, there is a one-time activation fee for new accounts with google. After the payment of the initial activation fees, the rest depends on the number of clicks that your targeted number of keywords gets. This is the time to keep a control on the number of clicks and the amount you are ready to pay per click. In this way, a daily budget is set for each advertiser and he or she can keep track of the costs incurred in the process.

Expert advice would be to have approximate cost estimates for the amount that you are willing to pay. This may vary from person to person including the initial signup process. You have the option of either raising the cost per click or optimizing the keywords or ad texts to improve the quality of the content. If the initial work clicks, you always have the option of expanding and growing your advertisement volumes. The actual cost per click is usually less than the maximum cost per click and starts decreasing once the ads start performing better. This takes time but as the quality starts improving, the cost per click starts declining. The content big feature allows you to set a particular price when the ads run on google. However, a different price is set when the same ads run on related google network sites depending on the content bids. To start, you can use a small list of keywords and certain targeted words. Cost per click also depends on what the competitors are willing to pay in the prevailing market. The language and the location target settings can lead to effective targeting of keywords and text. In short, the benefits are manifold, which are waiting to be reaped. So go ahead and avail of the benefit. The cost of google Adwords reduces with time and quality of your ads and the situation get better with time. google Adwords is a tool that is probably the best way to promote your product on the Internet. The reason is because there is no doubt about the fact that google is the most popular search engine in the world. Now, google Adwords itself makes it quite clear that it is a product of the Internets conglomerate and is a better way to promote your product through its product.  So let’s learn how to use it in an order that we can get the best value for our money.

How Exactly Does It Work?

If you avail this paid advertising product by google, your product will be displayed to the customers searching for your products as a ‘Sponsored Link’ on the site and its partner sites as well (such as youtube.) This might not necessarily make an influence on the google search results but what is to be noted is the fact that you get to choose keywords related to your product / business and also specify your targeted customers. Specifying the regions and languages in which your product appears can do this. It makes use of the PPC, i.e. you pay google only when potential customers click on your ads.

Get the Most Out of google AdWords Marketing

Marketing basically deals with the process of identifying who are your potential customers. When you make the ad profile for your ads, they provide you a number of options to create your target customers.

• Set the ball rolling by selecting a language and region you want to target.
• Create the ad consisting of a headline and two lines of ad text.
• Next, choose the keywords that will show the ad to all of whom type these words.
• Select your currency of payment and set your daily budget. You can even select the preferable cost per clicks for your ads. There is a tool called “Traffic Estimator” that will look into the positioning and cost for each keyword.
• Enter your google email and password and sign up. You are done with it.

Remarketing

It is the most important aspect of selling your product. The conversion rate of a general site has been found to be 10%. Although the number may seem a bit too low, a site achieving such a figure must be considered a highly successful one. Follow the tips as given below to re-market your product through google AdWords.

• First, try to set up an image ad instead of a text ad. A poster/picture does a work of a thousand words. Need I say more? Moreover, the ad set-up procedure of Adwords is such that it allows you to get better results out of an image ad.
• Use the customizable option of where the ads will be visible to set places where your ad will be visible. Strategically select the sites and try to make them unpredictable so that the customer is surprised.
• Also give some amazing offers on your products.

If you were to google “trip to San Diego,” you would undoubtedly receive a whole host of results, ranging from trip advisory websites to food reviews to hotel and flight aggregators. You have probably noticed that the first few results of any google search are highlighted advertisements, taking precedence over other search results. You may also be familiar with the column of results on the right hand side that displays the same types of results but catches your eye in a different way. What gives these search results this kind of priority? google Adwords.

Steps to Successfully Use google Adwords

google’s product “AdWords Beginner’s Guide” takes you through a step-by-step process to create your ad campaign.

Provence Wellness Center in New York City chose to embrace AdWords and is more satisfied with the results thus far. Beginning in 2009, the center relied mainly on traditional google search results to spread the words about its services. About a month ago, manage Mirille McCarthy upgraded AdWords, McCarthy said in a phone interview. She talked about the benefits of keyword targeting, “That’s where our clients come from. They just go on google and type ‘detoxifying holistic center’ [or] ‘facial massages’ or ‘honey wax hair removal’.” She said thanks to Adwords, clients could stumble on their ad faster and locate her business immediately.

A note to local business owners—like Provence Wellness Center—may arrange to have your ad appear to people searching within a certain mile radius of your business location.

It makes sense because most people rely on search engines. We ask every client how he or she found us, and they say, “google.” And with google, you have a choice of seeing a review,” McCarthy said. google allows you to create a setting that allows others to post reviews about your business. Finally, McCarthy talked about the ad reports she receives from AdWords. “Every month, they send me a report stating how many people clicked, how many people view our website, we pay per click, and you tell google your budget and then you know how many clicks you can receive per month for your ad.” To begin your journey, visit the AdWords Small Business Center for beginner’s guides, instructions, tips on creating your most effective ad and more. Once you’ve gotten settled in the AdWords world, refer to the AdWords Checklist to check whether you’re 100 percent on track for seeing the results.

Using the Keyword Tool to Get Keyword and Ad Group Ideas

Need help thinking of keywords or ad groups to add you’re your campaigns? Let the Keyword Tool do the work for you! When you enter words or phrase that are related to your product or service in the Keyword Tool, you’ll see keyword ideas and ad group ideas that are related to your terms. Then, you can get more keyword and ad group ideas that are similar to the results you like. You can also see the performance statistics for your keyword and ad group ideas, download your ideas, or add them to an existing campaign.

Why Use the Keyword Tool

The Keyword Tool can help you find keyword and ad group ideas that you might not think of while creating your campaigns. Here are some other ways the Keyword Tool can help you build effective keyword lists for your Search Network campaigns:

• Create New Ad Groups: Get themed ad group ideas that are related to your product or service. For example, if you search on dark chocolate you might see an idea for a dark chocolate bar ad group that includes such keywords as dark chocolate candy bars and organic dark chocolate bars.
• Start Broad and Then Get Specific: Use the Keyword Tool to experiment with broad keywords, and then you can try more specific keywords. For example, you might want to starts searching on the keyword chocolate and then more specific keywords such as dark chocolate or sugar-free chocolate. The more you experiment, the more keyword and ad group ideas you’ll have for improving your campaigns.
• Identify Negative Keywords: When you search for keyword ideas, you might see keywords that don’t really apply to your business. You can add these terms to your ad as a negative keyword to prevent your ad from showing when people search for them. For example, if you sell dark chocolate candy and search on the keyword ‘dark chocolate’, you might see the related term dark chocolate cake recipe. You’ll want to add that term as a negative keyword to prevent your ad from showing to people who are searching for dark chocolate cake recipes.
• Find Keywords and Ad Groups Based On Your Site Content: You can enter the URL of your business website, or any site related to your business. Then, the system will change your pages and give you relevant keywords and ad group ideas.
• Specify a Language and Location. You can refine your keyword and ad group results to a particular location and language. If you happen to be targeting French speakers who live in Switzerland, you can set the Keyword Tool to that language and location.

How to Use the Keyword Tool

To start with the Keyword Tool, enter a word or phrase that’s related to your products or services. You’ll then be able to see your individual keyword ideas as a list or group into themed ad groups.

Here’s how to use the Keyword Tool:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account as <a href="https://adwords.google.com”>https://adwords.google.com
2. Click the Tools and Analysis group-down menu and select Keyword Tool.
3. Enter a word or phrase, or a website’s address in the different sections of the box. To get more specific ideas, select a relevant category and the menu will appear. If you don’t select a category, you’ll search across all categories. To filter large sets of ideas, enter both words and phrases and a website URL.
4. Click Search. Your results will appear in the table.

Tips

• To search for ideas using the targeting setting from an existing campaign and ad group, select the campaign and ad group from the Campaign and Ad Group boxes at the top of your browser. For example, if you choose your chocolate campaign and dark chocolate ad group, you’ll see ideas for English speakers in the United States since those are the language and location targets for that campaign. It’ll also take the negative keywords in your campaign or ad group into account, which means they won’t show your ideas for any of those negative keywords.

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Stats from HTTP Archive show an alarming trend:

<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-14326" title="js-size-trend" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/9ff9b_js-size-trend.png” alt=”js-size-trend” width=”580″ height=”298″ />

This chart shows an average based on thousands of tested websites from the end of 2010 until now (HTTP Archive performs tests every month).

As you can see, a year ago the average web page included 128 kB of JavaScript. Now that number has risen to 189 kB. It’s gone up 48% in just a year.

Another 50% increase over the coming 12 months would put us at 283 kB of JavaScript. Then add all the other stuff that’s also growing, such as image download size, and the picture for web performance enthusiasts start to get pretty bleak.

We’ve shown before how JavaScript is the fastest-growing contributor to web page size. Time to start paying more attention to this.

P.S. Yes, we’re aware this blog is an offender. One of the reasons we’re planning a revamp.

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Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

The most iPad-friendly countries

To answer the question of which countries are the most iPad-friendly, we used web-browsing data from StatCounter, which is based on visitor stats from more than three million sites (see further details at the end of the article). StatCounter includes the iPad in its operating system stats, so we get a good indication of the iPad’s popularity.

What we found was that the top 10 iPad-friendly countries are: Singapore, Brunei, Angola, Nigeria, Australia, Kuwait, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Bahamas, and Hong Kong.

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-14342" title="iPad" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/2b390_ipad-friendly-countries.002.jpg” alt=”iPad” width=”580″ height=”363″ />

As you can see, Singapore is in the lead, with just over 7% of desktop web browsing traffic in the country. Brunei and Angola follow close behind with just under 6%. Clearly, in these countries, as in many others, the iPad is having quite an impact.

The most iPad-friendly regions

That was the top 10 countries in the world, which are iPad-friendly in the sense that the population there browse the web a lot with Apple’s tablet. But what does it look like if we apply this to a map of the entire world?

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-14343" title="iPad" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/2591e_ipad-friendly-countries.001.jpg” alt=”iPad” width=”580″ height=”363″ />

Then we see Oceania in a clear lead when it comes to iPad usage, closely followed by North America, Europe, and then Asia. Worldwide, the iPad accounted for 2.22% of all desktop web traffic.

Interestingly enough, although no countries in North America make it onto the top 10 list, as a region it scores a rather respectable 3.36%.

And in case you were curious, Android tablets accounted for 0.33% of worldwide desktop browsing.

What mark will the new iPad leave?

There you have it, how iPad-friendly countries around the world are. This doesn’t say anything about how popular the new iPad is though, something that would be interesting to know.

Granted, it’s now only a couple of months since Apple released its third-generation iPad, but it may cause bloat on the web.

If you have an iPad, do you find that you use it a lot to browse the web?

About the data: We looked at desktop OS market share data from StatCounter, which is based on visitor stats from more than three million websites. StatCounter reports iPad web traffic as “iOS” in the operating system category. To get up-to-date numbers, we focused on the month of May, 2012. You can see all our data <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AsDrQsdrVZikdFlsY3pWYWY3UDlGNWZnbHRETk5XWUE&gid=0″>here.

Flags of Angola, Australia, and Nigeria, as well as flags of countries in Asia and Europe, and top picture via Shutterstock.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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This year was particularly interesting because of the significantly higher online demand for service and products. Notice the spike in 2012. Search for mother’s day gifts are through the roof. We bring you attention to this fact so that you could take into account the higher overall demand, when looking at the results.

<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/ce589_graph.jpg”><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1269" title="graph" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/ce589_graph.jpg” alt=”" width=”456″ height=”282″ />

Notice the spike in 2012

Performance monitoring Methodology

For the purpose of the report we use fullpage web transaction, simulating end users’ engagement with the monitored websites. The reporting period covers a significant period of time, prior to the holiday and Mother’s Day. Website performance and availability measurements are scheduled for the most common web transactions at 15 minute monitoring intervals. The WebSitePulse <a href="http://www.websitepulse.com/services/transaction.monitoring.php”>application monitoring service is used to collect data and to create the reports. Average response time and website uptime are measure from San Francisco, Chicago and Washington. Average totals are then calculated and presented.

Results from 2011

In order to make sense of the current results, let’s look back to the results from 2011. Our Mother’s Day 2011 report was the most noxious one to date. Total average response time varied between 14.118 and 29.996 seconds, depending on the location and website. ftd.com, one of the retailers we monitored, was online 100% of the time, yet it took ~30 seconds to serve its visitors. Those sites could have really done better. Full list of results is available here. We have been performing the same tests since 2008. In all previous years the sites performed considerably better, with response time averages below 4 seconds.

<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/f34d0_MothersDay_2011.jpg”><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1273" title="Mothers Day 2011" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/f34d0_MothersDay_2011.jpg” alt=”" width=”445″ height=”294″ />

Results from 2012

This year we had better results than those from 2011.Considering the constantly increasing demand for online services, it would be safe to say this year the sites performed considerable better than last year, even though not as well as previous years. This year uptime was hardly an issue for any of the monitored online retailers. Looking at the average response time for the entire test period (05.05.2012 – 05.12.2012), we can see that our new entries are performing formidably well. Results are getting better across the board. You can see how even ftd.com and teleflora.com are able to keep up, despite the higher demand. According to the table, businesses are taking measure to make sure that they are able to meet the demand.

<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/5082f_MothersDay_2012.jpg”><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1275" title="Mothers Day 2012" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/5082f_MothersDay_2012.jpg” alt=”" width=”445″ height=”294″ />

Conclusion

According to our test, fromyouflowers.com outperformed all other sites without any downtime. Sees.com did particularly well in San Francisco but it had the worse uptime of all websites. 95.686% is a lot.

Online business is never predictable. Often demand and resources don’t match, and it is particularly harmful for a business not to be able to serve its clients. In many cases, being proactive is the key to overcome future problems with your website. Not being able to provide your content never goes unpunished in peak moments.  Regular maintenance, optimized code, a lot of performance tests, and <a href="http://www.websitepulse.com/services/server.and.network.monitoring.php”>remote server monitoring can be just as valuable as a good product, friendly customer service and affordable prices. We really expect to measure an improvement in 2013. This year’s results are good and it is clear that retailers have been busy improving their sites.

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Today’s article discusses some of the performance issues involved in translating JavaScript to machine code.

When & Where

Performance

Security

Cost

Today’s Best Approach

Caching

Conclusion

Go to Source

Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

The growing footprint of bitmap graphics

High-resolution monitors place increasing demands on the resolution of our graphics resources. For example, most of today’s monitors of good quality have around 110-130 PPI (pixels per inch). A retina display like that on the new iPad has around 300 PPI.

A square image with a side of 5 inches on a 130 PPI screen is 650×650 pixels. On a 300 PPI screen an image with the same dimensions would be have to be 1500×1500 pixels.

So, going from 130 to 300 PPI, the same 5-inch square image goes from containing 422,500 pixels to containing 2,250,000 pixels. That’s more than 5 times as many.

In other words, serving increasingly large images with bitmap graphics formats like JPG and PNG is becoming impractical, or at least inefficient.

All web page resources are growing in size year over year, but images account for such a large part of the average web page size that they have a bigger impact than for example CSS or HTML files. Keeping their size in check is very important.

Enter SVG and resolution independence

Modern browsers support SVG, a scalable vector graphics format (a cookie if you guess what the acronym stands for…). You’ve most likely heard of it, maybe even played around with it. SVG is standardized and has been around for years, but isn’t used much in web design today, most likely due to the poor browser support it used to have.

The benefit of vector graphics is that it’s resolution-independent and has a small memory footprint. The same image data can be rendered to a low resolution or a super-high resolution, it can scale indefinitely without any loss in quality.

Not all graphics resources are suitable for vector formats, of course. Photos are poor candidates for SVG. However, a lot of the graphics on the Web is made up of illustrations and icons, which are perfect for vector graphics.

Use of vector graphics future-proofs those resources, at least in terms of supported display resolutions. Check out the Emacs for Mac OS X site, for example, which totals in at a mere 21 kB, all resources included, and is scalable to any resolution (open it, resize the browser window to see it in effect).

Also, since SVG is a text-based markup language (XML-based), it compresses nicely with standard gzip, making the transfer size even smaller when people load your website.

Is browser support good enough?

Browsers with basic SVG support include Internet Explorer 9 and later, Firefox 4 and later, Chrome 4 and later, Safari 4 and later, Opera 9.5 and later. These account for around 80% of the web browsers in use today according to StatCounter data for May.

Check out CanIUse.com for more details on SVG feature support in different browsers.

Remember, you can always have a fallback option, a version of the site that uses pre-rendered JPG and/or PNG images if you detect that the browser doesn’t have SVG support. And no one says you need to use SVG for everything.

The tools are already there

It’s not like designers are handicapped when it comes to creating SVG content. The vector graphics tool chain is already in place, thanks to applications like Adobe Illustrator. There are even free, open source options, such as Inkscape.

Most logos and many icons are already designed with vector graphics, and it’s common in print. The translation to Web should be relatively straightforward. Famous last words, we know, but people are already proving it can be done, and done with style.

Conclusion

In short, web designers could use SVG to a much larger extent than they do today. It may not be suitable for all kinds of content, but there are plenty of websites that would benefit from it.

The win is a smaller memory footprint (faster download), and resolution independence. This will become increasingly important as more high-resolution monitors come into the market.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a website where all graphics automatically matches the screen resolution perfectly, and not have to worry that your site looks like a pixelated mess on that new iPad retina display?

What now?

If you want to dive right in and explore the world of SVG for web design, A List Apart has an excellent primer by Shelley Powers (don’t miss that there’s a part 2). You might also want to check out this introductory article by David Bushell over at Smashing Magazine. You can also head over to W3Schools for an introduction.

Image credit: Top image via Shutterstock.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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