We can’t say enough about these two tools when trying to diagnose an unusually slow site. Once the obvious issues have been examined (large images, bad scripts, slow database responses, damaged tables…) you should always run Firebug and YSlow sessions within your browser for further diagnoses.

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It started like just another day at one of our remote offices: email, follow-ups, meetings, calendar management, spreadsheets, a little pdf here and there, some programming, a last minute Photoshop tweak …

Normally, every time one of our workers finishes a task, he or she takes a 15 minute brain break or does some other Web 2.0 activity that benefits the organization. Some of us prefer Twitter, reading what new trends are out there. Others like to do a little Facebook to see what our friends – and foes – are up to. Reddit is also a definite favorite.

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Seriously folks, it’s been sixteen months of website building, tweaking and programming. Some of us here at WebsiteForensics need a break. Some of us here would love to go back down to New Mexico. Time to fire up our browsers for something else that usability testing or reading Reddit!

Before we hit the road let’s check out some vacation rental homes. We still have a few weeks of blogging before us, as well as a handful of sites to finish, but we’ve already found a couple of places we’d love to rent in Albuquerque or Santa Fe… Time to start counting the days on the calendar.

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The web is now littered with dead blogs. According to the New York Post, there were 200,000 abandoned blogs … in 2007. According to Richard Jalichandra of Technorati, the number of abandoned blogs is anywhere from 7 to 10 million in 2009.

Why do people abandon their blogs? Why do they start them in the first place? Too many have bought into the rags to riches stories of self-employed bloggers or have run out of topics, energy or desire to update. Now that reality has hit home, these dead blogs litter the web like dead leaves in November.

Read more about dead blogs: New York Times – Times Daily – New York Times – Blogging Experiment…

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“Whatsmydns.net is an online service that allows you to instantly perform a DNS lookup to check a hostnames current IP Address and other DNS information against a selection of random name servers around the world. This is especially useful to check the current state of DNS propagation after making changes to your domains zones.”

WebsiteForensics.com says: AWESOME TOOL!

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There are so many web-hosting companies to choose from and so many technical flavors. How do you know which one you want to sign up with? This is not an easy decision, as the server choice will impact development, deployment, security and many more aspects of web hosting. Do you really want to export databases, redo a CMS installation from the ground up and move your work from hosting company A to hosting company B after six months of bad service?

Not all companies are equal, not all services are the same and before anybody go ahead with a hosting provider, and one should do as much research as possible before hand. What are the best Linux Hosting Plans, why should you use a VPS (virtual private server), what is dedicated hosting, who offers the best email hosting?

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Finally, you can organise that flow of information that comes down your twitter feed! Twitter is now launching a beta feature which empowers you. By creating lists and adding the people you follow to respective lists, you can really improve your tweeting experience.

Thank you twitter! Really, thank you!

Now for the bummer: not everybody has lists enabled yet. They are only available to some twitter users for beta testing so please be patient if your account does not have that feature enabled! If you see this message, you’ll have to wait : Lists are a great way to organize the people you follow and discover new and interesting accounts. We’re currently beta testing this feature and it’ll be available to you soon.
Hold on tight…

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Homework help used to be a family affair. With parents working harder and ever changing curricula, helping children with their homework has become a difficult task. If parents could download a tutor right to their home … wouldn’t they?

Well, we’re almost there! TutorVista.com offers 24-7 online K-12 tutoring using state of the art technology: a fully functional interactive white board with a chat room so students can get help solving math problems.

TutorVista.com isn’t limited to k-12 subjects, they also offer Free college algebra help. Welcome to the 21st century, where help with homework is only a few clicks away from within the comfort of your home. As an extra bonus, parents don’t have to review their 8th grade algebra any more …

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Over the years, we’ve collected a lot of quotes about the Internet. Remember, we’ve been on the ‘net since 1993 so we’ve seen and heard a lot. Below are our favourites …

1. When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web…. Now even my cat has its own page. – Bill Clinton, 1996
2. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. – Peter Steiner, The New Yorker, July 5th 1993
3. There are two things in particular that it [the computer industry] failed to foresee: one was the coming of the Internet (…); the other was the fact that the century would end. – Douglas Adams
4. Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won’t bother you for weeks. – Anonymous
5. Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly. – Roger Ebert
6. Looking at the proliferation of personal web pages on the net, it looks like very soon everyone on earth will have 15 Megabytes of fame – MG Siruam
7. Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network. – Tim Berners-Lee, July 1996
8. You can’t take something off the Internet – it’s like taking pee out of a pool.  – Author Unknown, 1995
9. The Internet is just the world passing around notes in a classroom.  – Jon Stewart
10. We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.  – Robert Wilensky, 1996

More quotes here – here as well – here and here.

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We love our technology. In fact everybody here at WebsiteForensics has an iPod Touch, iTunes, thousands of mp3 files as well has hundreds of CDs. Some of us even had old tapes, LPs, EPs. One of us even owns a USB turntable – but what of music of yesteryear? We don’t just mean 78’s, we mean music from up to 120 years ago … We are talking about cylinder records from the 1870s to the 1920s. Cylinders made out of tinfoil, brown wax and plastic …

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