Let's get testing shall we, and help iron out the bumps, even if it is via reporting issues!

:)

Firefox 3 Beta

Labels: browsers

I'm a big fan of Firefox and always have been. I was a big fan of Firebird before that too (remember that one, oldtimers?). IE6 has been the bane of my designers' life and IE7, although much of an improvement over Internet Excruciator 6, is still not as good as I'd expect from a team of talented programmers with a multi-billion dollar sugar daddy.

So why do I think Firefox is crap?

Well I don't, per se, I just feel that the last couple of releases have been pretty shoddy. Firefox has always been a bit of a resource hog, but I mainly put that down to my multi-tab habit, often having two or more Firefox browsers open with 20 tabs in each.

Firefox has just done it again - 2x browsers open, a total of 11x tabs and although only 130k of memory being used, it's sucking 98% CPU!

It's been the Firefox 2.0.0.8 and rapidly followed Firefox 2.0.0.9 releases that have me gnawing things on my desktop. I just checked my Task Manager for the FF and 19 tabs I'm runing and it was using 200,000k + of memory, and it pretty much locked up my machine. Granted, it's my trusty old HP Athlon 900Mhz with I can't remember how much ram, but the point is, memory usage wasn't this bad before.

Even my Dell 1.73Mhz laptop with 2Gb of ram and my Dell 2Ghz+ with 2Gb ram desktop are suffering too.

I googled for answers the other day and was tipped to diable any plugins. Well, they're ALL uninstalled and I'm STILL seeing Firefox slow as hell.

Anybody got any answers? Was there a "bugger up Firefox" fix by M$ in the last security update to Win XP or is this latest version of Firefox really just a pile of crap?

Labels: browsers, rant

A new client has asked me for some help with their website and part of the task is to assist them with their SEO.

Their current SEO company have submitted their URL to a few dozen search engines and are apparently re-submitting every month for a fee of £40. For this £40 my client receives a report emailed to them once a month. And what does this report say? It tells my client where they rank in each of the few dozen Search Engines for their own name! They're the only company with their name so they're highly likely to rank in position #1 or rank on the first page for their name/term and they do.

There are two "Search Engines" where they do not have a rank or position. One is Ask.com, and the other is "Open Directory" or DMOZ which is a directory and not a search engine!

Now apparently the contract with this SEO company is due to expire at the end of this month so this is the last report with the SEO company. I have already advised my new client not to waste their money on this "service" again.

To simply run a report and email it to the client on a monthly basis for £480 a year is money for nothing in my book. I'd expect to do a couple of hours work every month for that sort of fee and I suspect the SEO Company is using some simple piece of software to generate this pointless report.

I have to add that this may be a reputable SEO Company but this is certainly not one of their reputable products!

Labels: consultancy, rant, search, seo

Here at 22i design we offer a number of services from hosting to web design, graphics to search engine optimisation etc. We've always written our own content too and we run a number of other sites where we write regular copy.

Since the beginning of September 2007 we've been writing daily Small Business News for the is4profit small business website, so feel free to take a look. Apart from a short holiday period we've written every day and have provided not only new, relevant and unique information but also boosted the site's traffic with just one new page a day :)

Labels: copy writing, services

This has got to be my favourite CSS Formatter/ CSS Optimizer/ CSS optmiser/ CSS compressor.

It's got a number of options in which, for example you can make the file highly compressed yet still readable or totally compressed and virtually unreadable or totally readable with less compression.

You can even feed highly compressed CSS files into it and set the output to readable so that you can see what you did, edit and recompress again.

Extremely handy piece of kit if you ask us ;)

Labels: css, tools