If you’re looking to check the performance of your blog, check out Is My Blog Working?, a nifty site that examines your blog for functionality and performance troubles. I discovered it a year ago but I forgot the name of it until this evening, when I was testing a couple random optimizations I made to jaredwsmith.com (most notably WP-SuperCache). It gives you all sorts of interesting tidbits about your server and blog software which might help you find any issues with performance that might be keeping folks away.
Tag Archives: tips
Tuesday coworking recap: HTML and CSS fundamentals
At Tuesday’s co-working session, I talked about a few of the basics of HTML and CSS (as best as I could within two hours, that is). One of the focal points of the session was the importance of laying a strong foundation for a well-built Web page via semantic HTML that strictly separates content from presentation. We also walked through building a quick-and-dirty page with HTML and CSS while keeping focused on the importance of semantics and standards.
A great addition to my toolbox: ImageOptim
Recently, I happened upon ImageOptim, a lightweight and incredibly effective image optimizer for PNG, JPEG, and GIF images (runs on Mac OS X only — sorry, Windows friends). It provides a ridiculously simple frontend to several commandline optimization tools. I often find myself dropping image sizes on an average of 20% per file — pretty impressive for already small .pngs that I work with. If you’re a Web designer and have Mac OS X, I consider this tool a must-have for squishing down your images to the last byte.
WCBD’s Social Media Push
WCBD, Charleston’s NBC affiliate, is launching a huge push into social media today by getting a majority of its news staff on Twitter. This is huge — I can’t say I’ve seen too many news agencies place a majority of their staff out into the wild amongst the Twitter-using public. Everybody from the anchors to the photogs is on and listening. Just today I was having a converation with morning anchor Brad Franko during the A-Rod (A-Roid?) press conference. WCBD’s had a presence on Twitter for a while, starting with producer Raymond Owens. Raymond was the first of the television journalists — and among the first of the journalists in Charleston in general — to make news a conversation over Twitter. That struck me. I was particularly pleased when chief meteorologist Rob Fowler joined up later, and gradually more and more folks at the channel started to tweet. I still think one of the marvels of Twitter is how it brings the people together with the media; with media listening in on what people are talking about over Twitter, it helps them serve our interests that much more effectively.
So, with that in mind, I’ve put together a few things that WCBD — and other news organizations tempted to take the social media plunge — should give a shot. Continue reading