Categories
social

Social Buttons are Bad for the Internet

Have you ever watched Man Vs Wild on Discovery and noticed that every time he went to some small tropical island there are always plastic bottles washed ashore?  Those plastic bottles are social buttons on the web.  They litter headers, footers, everything in between!  No matter what website you go to, small or large, you will find these social buttons.

The things we do for traffic.

What Harm Do They Do?

The social buttons have adverse affects:

  1. They slow down load times, especially if you want counts for tweets, likes, diggs, etc.
  2. They can cause unforeseen consequences and introduce weird bugs, such as the fb_xd_fragment Facebook bug
  3. You look desperate for traffic. This may be my personal opinion, but think about what adding buttons suggest. Admit it, your traffic hungry and will do anything for it.
  4. Your promoting their brands on your page, for FREE.

The Future of Social Buttons

My fear is that these social buttons will get worse before they get better.  Just recently Google created a sort of social button called “+1” and LinkedIn just joined the party.  We are beyond overkill now.  At some point they will reach a critical mass.  Perhaps in a few years people will grow tired of Facebook and its usefulness will decline?  I can only hope.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate social buttons. [Correction. Yes I do hate them].  Social buttons are the crack of the internet.  Once you are hooked you want more and more.  Pretty soon you turn into a bloated social sharing monster like Huffington Post.

Ultimately they really are the plague of the internet.  And the worst thing about it is that you basically have no choice but to give in.  Just ask Gawker.

Categories
browser wars chrome firefox opera

Browser Wars: The Truth about Firefox 4.0

I was just reading Maximum PC’s article reviewing modern browsers and they crowned Firefox 4 the best browser out there.  This is extremely unfortunate for a multitude of reasons and this post is my rebuttal.  It feels like Firefox 4.0’s feature list was created in response to using Opera and Chrome.  To put it more bluntly, Firefox 4.0 is nothing more than Firefox catching up to the competition.

I just heard a bunch of geeks gasp and clutch their mouse in complete horror.  How dare I say such a  thing! It has GPU acceleration out of the box, for christ sakes!   It’s gotta be good!  (Yes, thats a Maximum PC article dig)

Firefox copies features:

  • Firefox copied Opera’s menu in the top left-hand corner.
  • Firefox copied Chrome’s rapid development schedule.
  • Firefox copied Opera and Chrome’s simplistic interface motto (For example, Firefox now has tabbed extensions).

Firefox Improvements Debunked:

  • Firefox is FINALLY competitive in Javascript performance to Opera and Chrome.  However, Firefox 4 is not the fastest.
  • To improve security, Firefox 4 implemented something called HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security). The only problem is that no one supports this yet.
  • Firefox has GPU acceleration.  There actually is nothing wrong with that, but so does Chrome if you enable the labs feature.  In fact, I leave it disabled because GPU acceleration means little to nothing to me right now.
  • Firefox scores a 97 on the ACID 3 test, hurray!  Chrome and Opera only managed to get 100.  That was close.

Firefox’s Downfalls:

  • Firefox does not run plugins and tabs into separate processes like Chrome does.
  • Firefox does not bundle Flash with the browser for improved stability and security.
  • Firefox still takes longer to open on a PC than Opera or Chrome.

So how exactly is Firefox the best browser?  Because of their 1,000,000 extensions?  By now, 99% of the good ones are available on Chrome too.  If you want to tell me Firefox is better for web developers then I agree.  Firebug, yslow, and pagespeed all kick butt.  That is what I use Firefox for, but not for daily browsing.  There are plenty of subtle things that Chrome does that I love, but I don’t have time to get into them now.

Now don’t get me wrong, I want to praise Firefox for finally doing some development work.  They must feel really good finally catching up to a 1 year old browser (Chrome).  Boy I sound bitter huh?  Maybe because I was a huge Firefox fan for 5 years and then a brand new browser came along and opened my eyes to Firefox’s flaws.

Sorry that this post sounds amatureish, but I don’t have time to develop a well thought out article.  I just had to get this off my chest. Feel free to leave comments about your thoughts.  I’ll be more than happy to update this post.

Categories
apple verizon

Verizon has the iPhone 4 and it means absolutely nothing

Verizon Wireless finally has the iPhone 4.  There have been commercials running for the iPhone by both Apple and Verizon for the past month.  Fans rejoice, our savoir has arrived. . . right?  You couldn’t be more wrong.

The iPhone is coming out during a time when 4G and dual core phones have already been announced or are already out in stores by some carriers.  Verizon is potentially weeks away from releasing their next gen 4G  dual-core phone running on Android.  Now that is drool worthy.

The iPhone 4 is a nice addition to Verizon’s lineup, but it’s too late to jump on the Apple train.  True, we should be happy that it is here and when Apple gets around to releasing iPhone 5 then it will certainly be worth the hype, but for now do yourself a favor and hold off.

Categories
cloud

Amazon Route 53 Benchmark Comparisons

It’s been a few months now since Amazon Route 53 was released to the public.  Some of you may have forgotten about it, while others are hesitant to change their DNS servers because there may not be much upside to it.  Lucky for you, I couldn’t help myself and jumped on board within the first week of it being released.  I have never experienced any DNS issues since the switch and from my untrained eye, things seemed to be more consistent.  But what I really wanted was a reliable Amazon Route 53 benchmark to prove it.

Here is a DNS benchmark comparison of FantasySP.com provided by indeep76.com.  Below you’ll see how much of an improvement Route 53 makes from various locations:

During the last 2-3 months using Amazon Route 53, the DNS lookups are more consistent and more reliable, not only from the USA, but all over the world.  Depending on your current nameserver’s reliability, your results may vary.  Use indeep76 to check or use a monitoring service like mon.itor.us or pingdom to give you a nice baseline.  If you are getting anything close to 200ms + response times, then there is room for improvement.  If you want to use Route 53 on your domain, then head over to dns30 and make sure to have your Amazon AWS API keys handy.  It’s a simple setup and will make your site that much faster.

Sound like too much work for not enough payoff?  Scared of changing nameservers and risking your site be unaccessible?  I don’t blame you.  However, I will say that if you are obsessed about page speed and have already optimized your site via gzip compression, minification, JS packing, and a CDN, then optimizing your DNS lookup time is your final step.

Categories
Uncategorized

Tri Channel Not working on your GA-X58A-UD3R board?

So if you’ve just recently purchased the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R motherboard and encountered an error saying “Recovering Lost memory”.  I bet that error only occurs when your attempting to use tri-channel?  Try to boot the machine with memory in just the first two memory groups closest to the CPU.  Does it show the full memory correctly?

It turns out that you could have a bent pin on your motherboard.  I had a bent one and thought I fixed it, but I was stuck with dual channel until I exchanged the board.

Do yourself a favor, exchange your board ASAP if you have a bent pin.  It’s causing tri-channel not to work.

Categories
Uncategorized

My Comic as a Web Developer / Programmer

Categories
Google SEO

Is it Time for a New Google Syntax for Comments?

The average blog post is fairly easy to index and crawl for Google.  However, what happens when a single page has several hundred comments?  How does Google decide what’s important to include in a search query and what to ignore?  Heck, in some cases the comments on a Reddit post are more important than the actual summary of the article submission itself.

A lot of websites have been adding a voting aspect to comments for some time now.  However, no search engine (as far as I know), looked into taking these votes into account when crawling.  I propose a new type of “rich snippet” syntax for Google, Comment Syntax.

What if websites included the syntax so Google could not only clearly identify comments, but quickly pick the most popular/useful comments to showcase in certain search queries.  This could be applied to sites such as Digg, Reddit, Yahoo Answers, Stackoverflow, and just about any WordPress blog.

What do you guys think?  Would this be helpful?

Categories
apple

If iPhone4 has a problem with it’s antenna, why aren’t there more customer calls about it?

You heard about Apple’s press conference from Friday about reception and antenna issues.  Steve said much about nothing and tried to pass the blame around to whomever he could.  However, I want to concentrate on one particular quote that is surprising at first glance:

Only 0.55 percent of iPhone 4-related calls received by Apple Care have been related to the antenna or reception problems, Jobs said. The return rate, meanwhile, is at 1.7 percent, lower than the 6 percent rate for the iPhone 3GS, Jobs said.

.55 percent having to do with antenna or reception problems sounds remarkably low, so how can we account for that?  Here are two possible explanations:

  1. Most of the iPhone user base does not call customer service for issues.  Instead, they are smart enough to turn to tech blogs such as Engadget or TechCrunch.  I’d say the majority of it’s users either heard from their friend or read it online themselves that there was an obvious issue and waited for Apple’s response.
  2. It’s no secret that at&t has a horrible network.  Users who experienced dropped calls probably just chalked it up to at&t being a horrible network rather than their iPhone4 being the reason.  Who can blame them?  I would have probably assumed that myself had I not been reading tech blogs.

This is just my opinion, I have no real evidence to back any of this up.  What I can tell you is that after the Apple conference, Jobs has never looked more disconnected and arrogant as he did on Friday.

Categories
guide how-to php

Web Developers, You’re Not Alone

Web developers who plan to work alone, or are already doing so have a lot of obstacles to overcome.  One of which is being isolated and having no like-minded professionals to turn to for advice and feedback.   I know this one all too well and have been working alone  for the past 5+ years on various projects.  My current project, FantasySP, has been extremely challenging and rewarding at the same time.  Reinventing how people manage their fantasy sports teams can be quite a challenge.

Smashing magazine wrote a great article detailing why you should not be working alone.  However, some of us have no choice but to work alone. It could be that you are doing a solo project that no one believes in, or you simply do not have enough funding to get anyone else on board.  Fear not, this article will show you where to go to get some helpful feedback.

  1. Stack Overflow
    This is my personal favorite for websites to turn to when you are stuck in a bind.  As a developer on your own you will eventually run into programming problems that you need to get some outside advice on.  Whether it be a MySQL scalability issue or how to parse JSON in PHP.  You are free to post about whatever problem you are having, even newbie questions are often given great responses.  Questions are mostly geared towards programing, but can occasionally touch on server configuration or just plain old HTML questions.

    Best part about the site?  The community is friendly, extremely knowledgeable, and eager to help.  I’ve asked questions on that site that directly and indirectly led to answers.  I can’t say enough good things about this site and suggest anyone who is involved in coding to sign up and participate.   You’ll feel compelled to help others and try to be the first one to get selected as “Best Answer” to rack up points.

  2. Forrst
    Forrst is a site that can be used for networking with like-minded individuals and provide a spot to ask a wide range of questions that usually don’t pop up on Stack Overflow.  This site isn’t specifically limited to questions.  You have the option to post code snippets, screenshots of projects, to gain feedback.  You can even post useful links that you think can be beneficial to others.  Your posts can be private or made public, it’s completely up to you.

    If you are looking for feedback on a blog layout, design mockups, or coding then Forrst can be a great spot to check out.  I do not have much experience here, but from what I’ve seen thus far the community seems helpful and eager to help.  Getting started on Forrst you may feel a bit isolated, since it has a social aspect to it.  The site requires you to apply for it, but after waiting a week or so then you will recieve your invite code in your mail.  However, if you are helpful and engaged in the site then you should gain quite a few followers and get the feedback your looking for.

  3. Dribbble
    Dribbble’s sole focus is to post your designs and try to gain feedback from it’s userbase.  The site is invite only and is fairly difficult to become a member of without getting lucky or knowing someone already on the site.  I am not a member of Dribbble, but a designer friend is and told me the site is less about feedback and more about showing off your awesomeness.  Egos abound.

    So should Dribbble be on this list of helpful sites?  Yes and no. It’s still a great spot to post your designs and get feedback, but if you aren’t up to par then expect to hear about it.  That isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you are a pro, but amateurs beware.

  4. Web Hosting Talk
    Here we have a throwback site that you probably heard of.  Unlike the other sites mention, this is a forum and is geared towards web hosting questions.  Being a developer on your own means making web hosting decisions as well, so this site is a must to learn which places to avoid.

    It may not look the best, but the forum is loaded with people who have lots of experience with multiple web hosts and it even has employees from dozens of hosting companies.  Ask your questions about domain registrars, VPS’s, cPanel, or Plesk and you’ll get lots of great feedback

  5. Webmasterworld

    Another blast from the past, webmasterworld is the place to go for questions related to your server and SEO.  This is a fantastic place to go to learn about harmful webbots that should be blocked and the latest rumors/news about search engines.  Users on this site are anonymous, and for good reason.

    This site is about  asking questions that you probably wouldn’t ask elsewhere.  For example, if you plan to partake in questionable practices such as cloaking content for Googlebot.  The community is helpful and there is a large mix of newbies and experts on the topic of SEO.

    This list is far from perfect and I have a feeling I’ve missed quite a few useful sites.  Be sure and leave comments to other helpful websites to go to for feedback.

Categories
SEO

Google’s Soft 404’s are Inaccurate and Often Times, Outdated

Google has announced that they have implemented Soft 404’s as a way to indicate pages that appear to be 404 (page not found) but come up as 200 (Good Response).   My initial reaction was that’s great news and should help me out when I forgot to include a 404 header response.  So then I went to webmaster tools to have a look.

One example of a Soft 404, according to Google, is this news page about A.J. Burnett of the Yankees.  This is interesting for two reasons, 1) This page is 683 days old, 2) It is definitely NOT a 404 page and has relevant content.  I have about 50 or so of these pages that I think are incorrectly identified as Soft 404’s.

Though, perhaps I didn’t have enough content on the page about Burnett and need a bit more information for Google.  How about a page that shows all the news collected for Joseph Addai in September 2009?  This too is an example of a Soft 404.

Does Google not like the fact that I show/hide content and only list the first few items by default?  Even if they didn’t like how it’s displayed, why would it be listed as a Soft 404?

I am sure many of you have similar situations popping up on your sites as well.  At first glance Soft 404’s sounded great, but in actuality they need a LOT of work in the accuracy department.