Category Archives: Commentary

Cool URIs Don’t Change Apparently

Posted on April 6, 2010 by Alistair

The organisation behind a number of the standards that web development relies on in the present were forged through the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C. Over the years they’ve published countless documents on their web site outlining in great … Continue reading →

Posted in Commentary | Leave a comment

Search Engine Land Editorial Quality Dropping

Posted on March 29, 2010 by Alistair

In the last week or so there have been a number of publishing errors on Search Engine Land, which I consider to be major mistakes that should have been caught by the authors, writers, editors and good quality work flow. … Continue reading →

Posted in Commentary | Leave a comment

Wikirank, Visualising Wikipedia Usage Data

Posted on March 28, 2009 by Alistair

  I came across a clever web site named Wikirank, which provides visualisation tools to explore and compare the usage data from wikipedia.org.  If you’re wondering how Wikirank could manage that, wikipedia.org provide access to their web server traffic logs … Continue reading →

Posted in Commentary | Leave a comment

CommBank Keeping Warm By Burning Money

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Alistair

While viewing http://www.news.com.au yesterday, I noticed an advertisement on the home page for Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The ad was for instant approvals and same day funds (working now), however clicking the ad presented me with a “Page Not Found” … Continue reading →

Posted in Advertising, Commentary | Leave a comment

Sun Java & Bundling Google Toolbar

Posted on July 15, 2008 by Alistair

Today the automatic update kicked in for Java on my notebook, which it does quite regularly. I love the fact that different products implement a relatively unobtrusive upgrade to their software to keep it up to date, I know if … Continue reading →

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Web Usability 101, Useful & Descriptive Link Text

Posted on July 6, 2008 by Alistair

I’m an advocate for sensible usability on web sites and fully support the usability guidelines that recommend descriptive link text. There are measurable improvements to a users browsing experience when a webmaster makes a conscious decision to use useful link … Continue reading →

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Jim “Mr Shy” Mirkalami

Posted on April 1, 2008 by Alistair

In February, I wrote about receiving comment spam from a guy by the name of Jim Mirkalami. Since that time, there has been a lot of different people writing about the spam that they’ve received from our friend Jim; however … Continue reading →

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Jim Mirkalami, The Lurking Spammer

Posted on February 8, 2008 by Alistair

Today I received a curious comment into #if debug: Name: Jim Mirkalami Email: jim@homenetmail.com IP: 74.14.19.186 Comment: I have been visiting this site a lot lately, so i thought it is a good idea to show my appreciation with a … Continue reading →

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Matt Mullenweg Changes Domain

Posted on January 23, 2008 by Alistair

Blogging master and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has changed domain. Matt has been blogging for the last seven years under http://photomatt.net, which was an appropriate domain at the the time. Early on in the piece, Matt would post photos regularly … Continue reading →

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Ruby On Rails & Mongrel Generally Slow

Posted on November 6, 2007 by Alistair

Rich Skrenta wrote an article recently about ranking web 2.0 sites by server performance, in which he talks about server response time and latency and how it impacts a site. To see how everything stacked up, Rich decided that he’d … Continue reading →

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment