YSlow ShootOut will be a new feature, each Wednesday, where I will look at a few competing sites and how they stand up to YSlow’s scrutiny. While I am not sure it necessarily translates to any real value in terms of SEO rank or customer retention or conversion, it is always a good idea to try to speed up your site if you can.

This week’s contestants are Social News Sites! Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Fark, Hugg, and YCombinator, come on down! (Read more…)

So, I got my email this morning. This site is a BlogRush member no more. I’m not all that broken up about it. It was nice to get a little traffic that way, but I am getting more eight times as much traffic from wordpress.org than from BlogRush, so I’ll certainly live. (Read more…)

By now everyone should know the ubiquitous RSS icon with its orange gradient and white arcs and circle. It is a standard that can be fit into just about any website design with some appropriate color modification. And yet there are those who feel they know better. They replace the standard with their own RSS icon, whether it be a variant of the original or something completely different. Here are some of the worst offenders. (Read more…)

Okay, we all know that link love (i.e. pagerank) is a huge factor for Google. And that’s why designers want their links preserved in their themes and why sponsored themes were all the rage for a little while.

So, imagine this situation. You change to a new theme and find a link in your blogroll that you didn’t add. You go to link management and the link isn’t there to delete, but it is certainly there on the live pages. So, you go and check the theme file and all you find is a call to wp_get_links or one of its relatives. What the heck is going on? (Read more…)