web

I don’t know if it’s just the Mother’s day effect, but the top 10 online retailers for May 2009 were dominated by flower shops. The top shop is converting almost 40% of their visitors to buyers, though the average is just over 5%. Tim, meanwhile, claims he’s lowered his bounce rate to just 10%.

From Jessamyn: “don’t toss up a bunch of bibliographic citations when a decent URL will do. You’re online, act like you’re online.”

I’m not sure exactly what I’ll do with it, but thanks to this tip about webkit2png, I now know how to get screen captures of websites. Maybe useful for archiving. Who knows.

Hearing Steve Souders at WordCamp last week got me thinking about website performance, so I went looking for more. The slides from his WordCamp talk are online, but he gave a similar talk at Google I/O which got videotaped and posted richer detail than his slides alone will ever reveal.

Also on his blog: Use the Google AJAX Libraries API when you don’t have a CDN, and a post that asks why make users wait to download all your javascript before they see the page if you’re only going to use 25% of it at first?

Have You Thanked the Internet Lately? OneWebDay, our opportunity to celebrate “one web, one world, one wish” is just about a week away (though it falls on Yom Kippur). This video explains a bit and Tim Berners-Lee is planning his own video (worth mentioning: his net neutrality post).

If things work out, I’ll be posting a video too, even though I’ll likely be offline most of that day (not observing Yom Kippur, at a friend’s wedding).

Not A Pretty Librarian has kicked things off well with a first post titled “It Is Not A Tool,” covering an argument about which has more value to a teenager: a car or a computer.

On one side is the notion that “She can’t drive herself to work with a computer.” While, on the other side is the growing likelihood that she won’t drive to work at all, but instead simply work at whatever computer she has available. But then, this is a teenager, and maybe practical matters like work don’t top the list. And that’s where Not A Pretty Librarian (who are you?) asks:

Can you imagine being nineteen right now without computer access?

Indeed, when college students are spending so much time on AIM and logging into Facebook daily, is a car really as important as a computer in a teenager’s social life? When 89 percent of students start their research in a search engine, isn’t the computer more important than a car to get to the library?

With 1,800 CMS vendors in the marketplace, we’re mining what we know or know-of as a way to shorten the list. Kim named the following four:

• Joomla, a derivative of Mambo
   
• Collage appears to have good content reuse features
   
• OmniUpdate has a good list of higher ed clients
   
• Drupal: open source and turning heads

Ryan Eby gets excited over LiveSearch. And who can blame him? I mention the preceding because it explains the following: two links leading to some good examples of livesearch in the wild.

Inquisitor is a livesearch plugin for OS X’s Safari web browser. It gives the top few hits, spelling suggestions where appropriate, and links to jump to other search engines.

Garrett Murray’s ManiacalRage is an interesting blog on its own, but he’s also doing some good AJAX on his search interfaces. Look first at the archive search. But also take some time to appreciate the new content search. Sure, you’ll have some complaints, but it’s his site and not yours and there are some ideas there that are pretty interesting and useful.

“Web Pages That Suck: learn usability and good Web design by looking at bad Web design.”

Bookmarklets are interesting little bits of JavaScript stored as bookmarks. They’ve been around since about 1998 (earlier?), but I’ve never bothered to write one.

Here are a few examples:

• This sort of creates a bookmark
• Alexa Snapshot
• Wayback

37signals takes on Google and suggests some improvements.