You reap what you sow, I suppose. Yesterday, I criticized Cuil partly for their lack of stability under stress.

Last night, one side of my UPS died. Just died. No beeps, nothing. One side works, the other doesn’t. I guess one of the batteries has finished its lead-filled little life. That took out my primary name server and my in-house hub. At first, I thought it was just the hub, so I borrowed one from my brother-in-law and swapped that out. Still no light on the name server. Figured that out and managed to keep the downtime to an hour or so. Given that the two secondary name servers were alive and well, all was okay. it didn’t last. (Read more…)

Cuil was finally ready for its big debut. The Press had picked up the story. Digg was awash with stories of how it would kill Google.

So, I decided to check it out and I have to say I am disappointed. I’m cool with their Gaelic spelling of “cool,” but there are two significant problems with their service as currently released. (Read more…)

YSlow by Yahoo! is a great little plugin for Firefox and Firebug. It looks at a page and uses Yahoo!’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site to tell you how to make the page load faster. At least that is the idea behind it. In practice, however, not all of its suggestions are useful or even meaningful.

Let’s break it down and see what is worth the blood, sweat, and tears, and what is not. (Read more…)

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…)