With WebWait you can check the load time speed of your site/page. There are a zillion tools out there to do this, including add-ons for the browser, but this a nice feature:

WebWait pulls down the entire website into your browser, so it takes into account Ajax/Javascript processing and image loading, which many other benchmarking tools ignore.

As for non website owners, you can get involved too. Has your favorite site’s sidebar become like an unkempt garage? Did they add some new wizbang Javascript copy/paste that has brought the site loading speed to a crawl? A not-so-subtle hint might be to send them the results of a WebWait test.

Heart site visitors by keeping these times down.

Download Hmmcast #56 mp4

Mario lookalike, really? (YouTube), Useless Account, GMail, GTalk, More ways to post to your blog including GMail + GTalk + IMified, O’Flaherty Episode #2 (podcast)

Behind the scenes
What happened over the last 24 hours, explained in the video to some degree, was pretty neat and a good example of how something can traverse through multiple blogs, trackbacks, a podcast and a videoblog across the world. In month two of my videoblogging journey I’m experimenting with including the video equivalent of the blockquote and link in a blog post. The fact that one topic could go through all three mediums (text/blog, audio/podcast and videoblog) is fascinating to me.

Under the wire
While typing this I’m waiting for the video to finish uploading to the server as the clock ticks closer to 4:20pm. This is the closest I’ve come to not making it.

12 minutes …

Watching the upload indicator. As it is, I’m going to have to come back to this post and update with a link to YouTube once that stops processing. It will be after 4:20 on that part.

5 minutes … 75% done uploading … 3 minutes … time remaining shows 2:02 …

Get a bunch of Rubik’s Cubes together and create Rubikubism. Somebody should make a web generator for creating these. Can you imagine the time putting these together manually?

Just enter in the URL of any image online and pic2color will extract the colors along with hex code (see picture above). Press the “finetune” button and another window will popup with integration with GenoPal™:

GenoPal™ is based on patent pending technology that based on how your mind perceives color. You will notice that the colors proposed by GenoPal™ are pleasant and visually close to each other. This is because GenoPal™ is based on how your mind perceives color and not on the measurement of light (RGB).

Sounds like a mind trip with color but could be useful to webmasters and designers.

Don’t try this at home or office. Even the screenshot doesn’t completely do it justice.

Was talking with a blogger friend a little earlier about some formatting issues on a blog post. Minor, nitpicky stuff really. He was using red text instead of simple bold black text on a white background to draw attention to headings in a post. The use of red text on a white background can be really hard on eyes, but that was nothing like the site pictured above strangely located at the domain ilovetocomplain.com (not linked because I don’t want to promote reader blindness). Ironically, the site proudly claims to be “Finally a place to get it off your chest.”

The use of the whole ‘B*SH’ four letter word thing coupled with red dots that won’t dissipate from my vision made me want to think of a less flattering word using those same letters. They’d rather not have you leave anything with profanity in your comments, even though that’s the immediate thought when something pokes you in the eye. By the screenshot, readers may notice my inability to resist complaining. Was able to resist the urge to put this in the How To category here, as it would certainly fit how to use design to run off visitors.

And of course this site is in beta. Wonder what they do design-wise when it launches out of beta? Stick needles in site visitor’s eyes?

People with pet bunnies might not find this funny, but no real bunnies were harmed by these comics. In fact, you might print them out and use them as bunny litter. This collection of bunny suicide comics made me laugh out loud. My favorites include:

- bunny inside Space Invaders game
- diving into a jet engine
- standing in the middle of a street with a magnetic ‘R us store on the right and a knife store on the left
- not standing all the way on the Star Trek transporter
- cut in half by ice skating duo
- Obi Won Bunnobe light sabre skewer
- about to watch Fatal Attraction
- CD/DVD tray decapitation (pictured above)
- Bunny as Sarah Connor (”I’ll be back”)

Any of these give you a chuckle?

Microsoft’s new homepage design has less clutter and spotlights its Zune player. I prefer it over the previous style.

Digg adds content specific videos and podcasts in addition to the news. It seemed like the firehose main digg feed has become like 70%+ videos, so this seems like a logical progression. Like Microsoft, although not as severe, they’ve also made a few design changes. I like the options to better target what I’m looking for from digg and will be adjusting my subscription accordingly.

Also, on the podcast front — and due to the weather the Hmmcast that was scheduled for last weekend has been postponed until this week instead — you can add podcasts that aren’t in the database (Hmmcast isn’t in the DB as of this writing) in the appropriate category. I think ‘tech’ is closest from the subcategory choices: art/culture, business, comedy, education, games & hobbies, gov/org, kids, health, music, news, religion, science, sport and TV/film.

Broken digg images everywhere during update
Curious sidenote: when Digg went down to implement this new site version they broke their digg count image for every third party site, including this one, which can be seen clearly in the image featured in my last post. I wonder why they didn’t at least use that image space to produce a static image to return during the update?

Maybe the downtime was minima I don’t know, but it made several other sites I saw this morning display broken digg images, particularly the ones who put the digg count button at the very top of their site like the screenshot in the last post. This was why we have the digg image set to only show on dugg stories down at the bottom of the page. Don’t get as many diggs with this placement but it doesn’t make the page look partially broken during times like these. Maybe next time they’ll serve up a static image of the last known counts? Hope so.

Thomas Baekdal has done a comprehensive analysis of actual content usage space in a browser, coming to the following conclusion:

Finally we can see what sizes we need to design for. E.g. if you want to design for 95% of your visitors you need design for no more than 776×424px (fixed layout) - or between 720×400px to 1408×912px (fluid layouts). You can also see the pixel “gab” when designing fluid layouts - at 95% it is a staggering 688px in width and 512px in height.

This report reminds me somewhat of my search engine vertical space test. Too often web designers don’t give the content enough room to breathe. Perhaps I’m in a small minority but I’d rather see a site go members-only and stay easy to consume the content than remain ad-supported and a mess of tangled ads with content. How many good content sites can you think of that have ruined themselves by drowning the content with ads? Some sites start out with too many ads, thus severely limiting their chances for being linked and bookmarked by others.

While on the subject, here’s a good list of 250+ webmaster related tools.

Handy tool for webmasters and designers: color palette generator, which allows you to copy/paste a URL to a picture and get the palette of colors visually and in hex. You might also check against your site logo to get complimentary colors for your site design.

Hat tip to Lifehacker. Also added this to our growing generator list.

Of the many different ways to express RSS and podcasts tonight I came across the image above at netaddiction.com. A pair of headphones surrounding the new style RSS icon. Simple, yet effective. I like.

As for the website, they treat the following ‘problems’: Chat Rooms, Cybersexual Affairs, Cybersex Addiction, Cyberporn Addiction, Chat Room Addiction, Obsessive Role Play Gaming, Compulsive Online Gambling, eBay Addiction and Compulsive Surfing.

eBay addiction? Is this spending too much time bidding on stuff one doesn’t want, need and/or can’t afford? Would have been nice to see the problems linked to definitions. Yes, most of them are obvious, but for a site that promises recovery, shouldn’t they define what the problems are? In fact, the FAQ section does define all of the conditions, including eBay addiction:

In more serious cases, eBay addicts feel a sense of accomplishment when they discover they are the highest bidder and begin to bid on items they don’t need just to experience the rush of winning – sometimes to the point that they go into financial debt, take out a second mortgage, or even go into bankruptcy just to afford their online purchases.

Yes, that would indicate a problem The site offers an auction addiction test.

Curious, I took their internet addiction quiz of which I scored the following:

34. You are an average on-line user. You may surf the Web a bit too long at times, but you have control over your usage.

I diasgreed with the context of some of the questions and why were there checkboxes for all the answers? Anybody who seriously checked multiple answers for most the questions like “How often do you feel depressed, moody, or nervous when you are off-line, which goes away once you are back on-line?” needs much more than internet recovery. It simply isn’t logical for a person to be able to answer with more than one answer.

I vote for adding question #21: “How often do you view internet forms and wish the right type of checkbox or radio button control was used?”

In all seriousness, one of our businesses is on the web and the other requires us to process a lot of official business through the web so we spend a lot of time proportionally on the web. The web isn’t an addiction, though, which I suppose some might point to and declare as some kind of denial. We are 24/7 connected to the internet and nearly that on Skype and Second Life, but the former is used as our telephone service for one business and the latter is used more as a passive, sometimes interactive chat than something either my wife or I need to do constantly. Neither of us are connected 24/7 to IM clients and our email is auto-retrieved every 5 minutes.

We take our share of AFK time and honestly since going TV-less we haven’t really increased our overall internet time which means we’ve actually added more R&R time to our lives. We typically take the most AFK time from the internet on Sunday, followed by Saturday. In fact, if you read this close to the publishing date/time (Sunday) we aren’t even online right now, my wife and I are offline celebrating our 17th anniversary in another state. I probably took my camera to capture the moment, but we didn’t take our computers or even PDA.

Blogs can use future post publishing option to get away
Thanks to future post publishing options, it’s possible to get away without looking like you are away. Not that we’re trying to deceive readers and I wouldn’t recommend doing this for too long a period without telling readers, but it can be a useful way to insert some future published posts during AFK times and keep readers with something new in their readers from your blog.

There are some cons to this like if the post format goes wacky it could screw up the site while you aren’t there to fix, so it’s important to check the post preview on these type posts carefully. Also, you won’t be able to answer any reader comments immediately. One possible solution is to give somebody else you trust admin access while you are away and ask them to moderate the site and answer any pressing comments. Darren Rowse has a good list of 7 things you can do when you go on vacation, but I’d add that you can use some of these techniques for regular days off too.

Better personal and professional organization creates more free time
One thing I’ve written repeatedly is that it is important to take time off. Yearly vacations aren’t a distraction, they are vital to a healthy life. I don’t just write or say this, I actually do this every week (with very few exceptions). You’ll burn out if you do anything too much and no project, hobby, business, whatever is worth adversely impacting your health. It is possible to be extremely busy and yet still have a good amount of R&R time. Just work on personal and professional organization skills and cut down or out activities that don’t better your life in some appreciable way like providing a smile, hmm (hint, hint), networking, business, or other valuable personal or professional supplement.

As always, look forward to reading your insightful commentary on this and/or other posts when we return.