Several months back I covered a new hosting service called Grid Server by Media Temple that I learned about via TechCrunch. I signed up for an account and played around with it for a few of our sites.

Today we cancelled the account. For our purposes it just wasn’t worth it. We’re going to continue using Dreamhost for all our hosting.

The Grid Server service is just not fully baked yet in my opinion. There were a few planned outages, the speed was not any better in our testing, and the back-end (while slick-looking) was just too confusing.

» Continue reading “Media Temple Grid-Server Verdict: Mostly Hype”

Today I changed the RSS feed for this website from summary to full-text. Why did I switch to full text? After a few months of reading other people’s feeds I realized that I much prefer sites that offer a full feed rather than a summary and that I still visit the site in question often enough (so they aren’t necessarily losing traffic) - mostly to read comments or view the feed in its original format.

There are pros and cons of going full-feed vs. summary. I agree with John Chow that it’s usually a better way to go (see #7) - but there are some caveats - I’ll cover the pros and cons in a future post.

» Continue reading “Switching to Full Text Feeds”

Does your website load in 2.4 seconds or 240? With today’s high broadband penetration, many people have started to take load times for granted. I run into more and more websites that take a long time to load due to bad coding, gratuitous (and risky) use of widgets, an ungodly amount of embedded media, etc. Yesterday even Techcrunch was brough down due to these issues. If your pages are slow to load, people won’t come back. Here are some ways to speed test your website:

» Continue reading “3 Quick Ways to Speed Test Your Website and Improve Loading Time”

If you are a web developer and you use Firefox for your browsing/testing/debugging/CSS needs you HAVE to get these tools:

Web Developer Extension and Firebug

» Continue reading “Must Have Firefox Addons for Web Developers”

My favorite CMS / best blogging platform on the planet just got an upgrade (35 minutes ago) with the release of Wordpress 2.1 - codenamed Ella. Can’t wait to take Ella for a test drive. This is a pretty significant upgrade with lots of new features.

Here are some of the more exciting new Wordpress features:

» Continue reading “Wordpress 2.1 Now Available”