Year: 2010

Categories
rant

5 Reasons Why Mashable is a Bad Influence for the Web

Very recently Mashable created a post on their site indicating 5 more reasons why “Internet Explorer 6 Must Die“.  (Yeah, no shit!)  I was so inspired by their post that I decided to create 5 reasons Mashable is bad for the Web.  Mashable has so many bad habits incorporated into it’s site that I fear the rest of the web industry will think it’s okay to follow their footsteps.

It’s unfortunate that no industry leaders have stepped up to say how much their site blows the big ones. (Or perhaps I’ve missed them?) I implore everyone to post any site that rips on Mashable in the comments section below.

Now, onto my top 5 reasons . . .

1. It takes Over 30 Seconds to Load

For those of you unfortunate enough to have been linked to a Mashable story (my apologies), you’ll notice that it takes a LONG time to load.  Precisely 38.98 seconds according to Google Chrome’s developer tools.

Speed Kills. As in kill me now.

Keep in mind that I am using the fastest browser possible at rendering javascript and web pages in general.  Also keep in mind that my internet connection is Optimum Online Ultra, which is 101mbps and my CPU is a quad core.  If my computer has trouble rendering this website, then I fear for our little ones.

2. Mashable Loves Advertisements

In case you haven’t noticed, Mashable has 15 advertisements on their homepage.  I have never come across a website with more advertisements than this, and I hardly even leave my house folks.  I’ve tried!…(To find a similar banner ridden site.)  Basically what Mashable is telling people is that it’s perfectly fine to have this many advertisements and completely kill the end user’s experience.

According to their traffic numbers and apparent influence on the modern web, you don’t give a shit.

3.  They Report Funny Videos Too, LOLZ

If you thought all Mashable did was work hard to uncover stories about Google’s security breach in Gmail and the drama in China, then you are sadly mistaken.  Lucky for us all that they are able to uncover recent gems such as “Ninjas Perform Most Deadly Nexus One Unboxing Of All Time” or “Hilarious FarmVille Parody Ad Tells It Like It Is [VIDEO]” and, of course, “Nosy Boyfriend or Girlfriend? There’s an App for That“.

This is the hard hitting journalism we expect from a website that reports the latest trends and news from social networking and social media sites.

4. Digg, Tweet, And Facebook THAT ONE!

Just when you thought the advertisements on Mashable were the worst thing about, they totally redeem themselves by including a Tweet button, Digg button, and Facebook button.  Not those small crappy ones either, Ohhh no.  We are talking those oversized ones that take up way too much room than they should.  But just in case that didn’t get in your way, as a backup plan they have a “share” button and an “email” button just underneath.  And, JUST TO BE ON THE SAFE side, they included a “Become a fan of Mashable on facebook” widget and a “Google Connect widget” on the right column of their site.

Mashable, Just Trying to Spread their plague.

That’s Mashable for ya, going the extra mile every time.  All for us.

5.  Google is Happy, Internet Explorer is Sad

You may find yourself reading an article and all of a sudden you encounter some ridiculous smiley face.  It’s like when I mention things like Apple or Google these faces randomly appear so you know what your supposed to think about them.  What the fuck.  How did the faces start popping up here?!?!  Vista , iPhone , Mashable .

Though I have to admit, it totally works when I mentioned their site.

—-

And please people, for the love of all that is holy.  If you absolutely HAVE to go to their site, use their mobile version instead.

Categories
routers

Configuring the Linksys WRT610 Router for Dual Band

If you need a router with dual band support that is also gigabit, then the Linksys WRT610 is your best option. I have seen a lot of user reviews about dropped connections.  This was mostly due to a lousy firmware, but users were also at fault for improperly setting up dual band.  If you do not set up dual band support correctly, you will see connection dropouts.  I recommend NOT installing the Linksys software it comes with.  Please configure it manually with the following settings:

Set up Page

I have had this router for roughly 6 months or so and have never had a dropped connection using the configuration above.  I also have seen Wireless N speeds at 90mbps and wired speeds at 100mbps.  I am one of the few people fortunate to have Optimum Online Ultra, and I highly recommend to have it paired with the WRT610.

This router is as good as it gets folks, so don’t be discouraged by poor reviews by users from a year ago.

Categories
Google SEO

How Banner Advertisements Affect Google’s “Site Performance”

As you may have heard a while ago, Google decided to incorporate load time into where sites rank in terms of search results. The faster the load time, the more of a bonus they should get in SERPs. One of the things that slows down page loads more than anything are site advertisements. In this blog post we are going to look at what advertisements can do to load time, according to Google’s “Site Performance” chart in Webmaster tools.

For this analysis, we are going to look at FantasySP.  FantasySP is a fantasy sports news aggregator that makes managing a fantasy team and tracking player’s much easier.  I will show site performance when it had several ad networks compared to when it has just one ad network (Google Adsense).

Below you will see a chart of the performance of the site with about 3 to 4 different ad networks.  The more ad networks should result in worse performance.  The site load-time PRIOR to January of 2010 shows load-time with several ad networks.  After January, just one ad network is used: Google Adsense.

Google says: On average, pages in your site take 3.9 seconds to load (updated on Jan 10, 2010). This is slower than 63% of sites. These estimates are of medium accuracy (between 100 and 1000 data points)

Quite a dramatic improvement isn’t it?  The more ad networks, the worse your load time is, no surprise there.  But let’s take this a step further. . .should we disable ads  for Googlebot to artificially inflate load times in your favor? With no ads shown, FantasySP should load a lot faster.  But we’ll get back to this in a bit.

Next up, I’ll show site performance for the mobile FantasySP website, which is geared towards super fast load times.

Google says: “On average, pages in your site take 0.4 seconds to load (updated on Dec 7, 2009). This is faster than 97% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (less than 100 data points).”

The moral of the story is obvious, watch what ad networks you use for your website because it is killing your site’s load time.  Not only for Googlebot’s site performance numbers, but your actual real life visitors as well.  Why not offer a membership option for users to browse your site advertisement free, which is what FantasySP does.

UPDATE:

As of 1/19/2010 I realized that the Site performance numbers are based on Google toolbar users load times.  This means that while removing banner ads and unnecessary code snippets for Googlebot may be good because it can crawl faster, it won’t benefit you in any way when it comes to Site Performance numbers.  Total bummer.

Categories
apache php

How to restart Apache with PHP

If you ever need to restart Apache via PHP, you’ll notice that the “passthru” command doesn’t quite work out like you thought it would. For those of you who have cpanel and WHM installed, this will be an easy solution.  cpanelmatt at the cpanel forums created an XML-API PHP class to be able to handle situations like this.

First download the XML-API PHP class.

Next, follow the code example below:

include("xmlapi.php");

$ip = "127.0.0.1";
$root_pass = "somepass";

$xmlapi = new xmlapi($ip);
$xmlapi->password_auth("root",$root_pass);

$xmlapi->set_debug(1);

print $xmlapi->restartsrv('httpd');