The data is based off the uptime of the individual companies’ websites. Apple, Microsoft, Red Hat, Slackware, and the others listed all use their own operating systems to run their servers, and you would expect them to put a bit of resources into making sure their sites are as reliable as possible, correct? After all, would you use a server OS from an organization whose website goes down frequently? Normally a product’s website speaks well for the product’s reliability, or so many people assume anyway.

It should be taken into account that these websites have different kinds of resources behind them. Many are run by enthusiasts with a minimum of resources, while others have corporate backing. Keep this in mind while reviewing the data.

Yet Microsoft, who arguably has the most cash to throw around, has one of the worst scores downtime-wise. I’m not a Microsoft fan by any stretch (I like Linux on my servers, and the Mac OS for desktop use), though I have more experience with their consumer-level OSes than any other. I know Windows is a pile of swiss-cheesed spaghetti code…but with the kind of resources they have, how are they letting everyone else run cirlces around them? It’s not even funny anymore.

For all the fun charts and numbers, click through to Royal Pingdom to the full article.

©Matt Harzewski.

The article is quite long, with plenty of screenshots and illustrations. It goes through the entire design process of a website, showing how little touches along the way can dramatically change the overall feel of the site, and provide the right effect. Along the way you’ll hopefully pick-up a few tricks for later usage.

Keep an eye on PSDTUTS as they publish the rest of their Web Design Week posts.

©Matt Harzewski.

Part of having a successful website is attracting visitors. Keeping those visitors on your site, however, is another topic altogether. Of course, once you have the visitor on your site you’ll want to keep them around for a while rather than seeing them quickly leaving to go somewhere else.

In order to do a good job of retaining visitors, increasing pageviews and time on the site, it’s important to think about what could cause visitors to leave. By knowing some of the major reasons that people are leaving your site, you can make adjustments to improve this situation.

The list covers the main areas that you want to pay attention to to successfuly optimize your site in this manner, which pretty much fall into the categories of content, design, and advertisements. Keep in mind though, that if people notice that you are actively trying to keep them on your site, it will be a major turn off. So don’t

• Be stingy with outgoing links
• Open external links in pop-up windows
• Try to disable the Back button

Stay away from little tricks like that that hinder the user experience.

©Matt Harzewski.

Today I would like to ponit you toward Web Design Ledger, a design blog I’ve started reading recently. Designed by Henry Jones (Henry Jones the designer, not the adventurer. At least, I think… ), it’s fairly simplistic and clean, but the style just looks great.

Web Design Ledger is one of those designs that isn’t jaw-droppingly amazing, but is more subtle. It’s clean and simple, which score it big points, and it’s full of little details that really make the design.

Some of the little touches I like about it are the background, which you don’t really notice at first, the big buttons along the top, and the styling of the “Recent Comments” column, with it’s subtle word bubble shaping.

I like the use of thumbnails, both in the content column and in the sidebar. I also noticed that there are default category thumbnails (or so it seems, anyway) that appear when a post doesn’t have an associated thumbnail, something that I’ve been planning to add to Webmaster-Source in the near future, so I don’t have to worry about creating an icon for every single post I write, which would be a little bit too much work for my liking, since I write daily and not necessarily every post I write needs a unique image. The general idea is “if this post doesn’t have a thumbnail, check the category and display the default thumbnail for that category.”

The comments section looks a little bland though. I think the addition of Gravatar support would liven them up a bit, and make it easier to differentiate between commenters, something that a name alone doesn’t always do. (When you scroll through a comment thread, do you look at everyone’s name, to see who’s saying what?)

One minor suggestion involves the area with the RSS/email subscription links. As it stands, it looks pretty good, and looks like it does the job (namely, letting people subscribe to the blog) pretty well. However, I don’t see the standard RSS icon anywhere. It’s a widely used convention, and probably one worth following. Also, a lot of people in the web design, development, and blogging fields are in to Twitter. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to offer a Twitter feed as a subscription option, maybe supplemented with some occasional “tweets.” It may bring in some more people, or encourage existing readers to drop by the site more often. Just a thought.

Overall Web Design Ledger has a fabulous design, and some great articles. If you’re reading this, keep u pthe good work.

©Matt Harzewski.

Annexation is a sleek and fairly minimalist theme, with a unique visual look. It would work well for any sort of blog, and has plenty of room for tweaks.

Out of the box it integrates with Twitter and the Last.fm Records plugin, and there’s plenty of space in the widgetized sidebar.

The search box at the top of the screen is very prominent, though a little wide for my liking. It’s positioned near the RSS icon, which seems a good idea.

Overall it’s a very nice theme, and definitely worth a look if you’re in need of a design for your blog.

You can view a live demo and download it here.

©Matt Harzewski.

The new service is called “Vertical Lense Technology.” It allows for topical search engines to be created. These search engines, as seen on TechCrunch, the only site to use the service so far, can

• Index the partner site in real-time. Whenever a post or comment is added, it’s sent to Yahoo to be instantly indexed.
• Allow ranking tweaks. When you search on TechCrunch, you are shown a carefully adjusted mix of web and Crunch Network results, ordered in a way that hopefully fits their audience.

TechCrunch describes their experiences with Vertical Lense on their website.

Since we publish using WordPress, supplying our data using the first API essentially required that we design and deploy a plugin that would send information to Yahoo’s servers every time there was a new post or comment on any of our blogs. We also needed to create a similar data indexing system for CrunchBase so that contributions there would show up in the results as well. To ensure that all of our archived content was incorporated in the search index, we supplied Yahoo with historical data dumps from all 10 sites. Perhaps needless to say, this took a considerable amount of time just to ensure that the data we indexed at Yahoo was accurate and complete.

You can read more about this on the Yahoo Search Blog.

Now, when can I get one of these?

©Matt Harzewski.

©Matt Harzewski.

As I’ve said quite a few times: Your domain may be your most valuable asset. If you lose your domain, your website might as well not exist. No one can access it if they don’t know where to go.

Kevin from Blogging Tips has a great post up on this very topic. How Secure is Your Domain?

©Matt Harzewski.

They don’t like it.

The general idea behind Magpie is similar to that of Pay Per Post. You sign up, and set a post frequency. Then Magpie will add a paid tweet every x (the post frequency you set) tweets. The only disclosure is a “#magpie” hashtag at the start.

I find the idea interesting, but I’m not about to foist it on my followers, since at least 90% of them wouldn’t like it, and I’m not a huge fan of receiving the paid tweets myself.

• Michael Arrington’s Opinion (TechCrunch)
• Josh Catone’s Opinion (SitePoint)

I asked, around November 11 or so, my followers what their opinions were, and their responses were overwhelmingly against.

I’m guessing Magpie will either fail from disuse when people’s follower counts take a hit from using it (and they reconsider using the service), or Twitter will get fed up and make an addendum to the Terms of Service. I have to commend them for their nice design though.

©Matt Harzewski.

Maybe you have a custom survey you put together with PHP, or a web directory, a Job Board, or some other thing that you can’t really do inside WordPress.

Here’s a bit of code that will help integrate your script with your theme, and will also make other internal WordPress functions available to your script:

<?php
require('../wp-blog-header.php');
get_header();
?>

Your page content here.

<?php get_footer ?>

Easy enough? Just make sure the require statement points to the correct path of wp-blog-header.php. This example assumes that your script is inside a directory rather than the root (e.g. /myscript/index.php). If your script is in the same directory as wp-blog-header.php, just change the “../” to “./” ans you’re all set.

Whenever your page is loaded, WordPress will be called upon as well, and your theme will be added in around your script. There’s a small chance that WordPress may conflict with your script though, so be sure to test and change any variables and functions that interfere with WordPress’s internals.