Karls Blog

Since Microsoft bought Deep Metrix, I wondered what they would do with it. Well, some details have eventually come to the surface

http://www.liesdamnedlies.com/2007/07/microsoft-gatin.html

Gender based metrics could be very kewl! We currently use Google Analytics for many of our clients requiring basic analytic services, and we have a full blown WebTrends hosted solution for our large clients, so it will be interesting to see the end result of this project...

In my last post I mentioned a caching technology called Akamai. We use it for a number of our global clients to help (significantly) improve performance, especially when we host multiple country sites on one core set of infrastructure.

They literally have 1000's of servers all over the world, and these servers cache data and have special DNS servers that choose the physically closest server to deliver the content. Works a treat with pre fetching of cached data, shortest path, multiple failover paths and routes etc. Very kewl stuff.

How big are they? Check out some of their stats here:

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz3.html

• 250,000 active streams
• 21,000,000 vistors / min globally
• 1,600,000 hits / sec globally

Very nice ;)

I have used a tonne of tools to help me debug web sites on the client side. Even 4 years ago proper HTTP debugging was very difficult and the tools very simple, but a number of tools have come to the rescue. I used to use Firefox Web Developer Toolbar as well as the IE Web Developer Toolbar. But today, I had an issue with a large flash site we deployed for a client in China (http://www.excitechina.com.cn/) running REALLY slow even though its hosted on a heap of servers in 2 separate data centers and has Akamai on top to cache the whole package. Both the Firefox and IE Dev Toolbars fell way short, so I went hunting for something better ... and found it :)

Hello Firebug! This little ripper of a plug-in helped me track the contents being pulled in by the Flash container, and debug a configuration error with Akamai - one happy client (and an even happier client ;)

PS - Been at the Next Digital Shanghai office this week - we're really building a great team with some awesome skills. Took some digi pics and hope to post them next week...

We design, build and deploy web sites and web applications at a rapid rate, so I thought that I would post our work here as we release it!

This week we turned out two new Umbraco sites:

• Supercheap Auto (http://www.supercheapauto.com.au/) - built on the fabulous open source CMS, with a great design and some nice flash elements (like the online catalog)
• FleetPartners (http://www.fleetpartners.com.au/) - I love the clean user interface of this Umbraco site. Also fully integrated the lease calculators with Umbraco data - nice!

Franky Arrigo just made the front page of Digg.com - nice work Franky ;) Link is here:

http://digg.com/microsoft/Microsoft_Accepts_it_Ignored_the_Web_Standards

We are a creative agency (as well as being highly technical) so I love seeing the work that comes out of our very talented team!

Here is an interesting view on what some other agencies are doing ;)

http://jezebel.com/gossip/photoshop-of-horrors/heres-our-winner-redbook-shatters-our-faith-in-well-not-publishing-but-maybe-god-278919.php

Read it first on /.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/10/0012209

I do like the concept of rating a site's 'importance' by the time spent on the site rather than page views. Would be interesting to see if there is any correlation in the two. Hopefully, will stop news sites from splitting news articles into multiple pages just to bump the page views ;)

If this is the way forward, Googles addition of DoubleClick is even wiser - their more 'intelligent' page ads (flash, java etc) are more than capable of delivering ads based on page view duration...

I'm a keen observer of security patterns and practices, and I truly believe Microsoft is getting it right. I subscribe to Michael's blog religiously, and read it with a passion. He is interviewed here:

http://howsoftwareisbuilt.com/2007/06/24/michael-howard-microsoft-interview/

It reads like so many of his blog posts, so its well worth the read....

Franky is off to the US of A:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/FrankarrOnMSDN/~3/131754430/from-little-things-big-things-grow.aspx

When I traveled there earlier this year, I got an understanding of how different the US is to the Australian market, and can totally understand why he would get excited by the idea ;)

Good luck Franky, keep in touch!

LOVE IT!!!

http://www.davesdaily.com/pictures/908-mischievous-aussies.htm

Over the last 10 years, the digital landscape has changed dramatically, and so have we. We now have 5 separate business divisions, 180 staff in 5 offices covering 3 countries.

As such, the 'WDG' name no longer reflects the large range of services we offer, so we have decided to wrap up all of our businesses (WDG, SMSi, ResultMedia, Alfresco and Advantric) and rebranded ourselves as:

http://www.nextdigital.com

We strongly believe that the new name and brand essence will assist us for the next 10 years of growth in this cutting edge industry.

Very exciting times :)