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As much as I am impressed by the moxy of Donald Trump, I don't normally watch shows like the Celebrity Apprentice. This season's episodes caught my attention though because of how Poison's lead singer Bret Michaels handled himself. Kind of a weird topic to bring up in a Web Development blog - perhaps, but I felt there was a lesson to be learned.

I was looking around for a nifty way of examining load issues on clients sites. I wanted some way of quickly pin pointing which images/files were causing the issue (or the delay was even being caused by site file sizes in the first place!). I discovered a cool little site called Pingdom that did the job. Simply enter a URL and even check the save URL box. Pingdom drills down through your file load times and display in KB each different component of the page. It also gives you an outline summary of basic info about the site, how many images, style sheets, plugin, redirects, external objects etc. Simple and neat it does what I needed! But Pingdom is more than just that, it is also an uptime and performance monitoring system. The system lets you know if you site has gone down, gives you uptime reports, response time reports and connects nicely to Twitter, SMS and Email to alert you if troubles a-brewing.

David McKillen WebStrategies Inc.

I came across Clicktale and thought they deserved a shout out so to speak based on my interactions with them. My personal reasons for having an interest in heatmaps is because I find it interesting how little users are really interested in when they visit any given website. There are some very interesting usability challenges you can find having examined some of the results of these tests. Some of what they do is already under the Analytics umbrella but some hotspots (scuse the pun) I think worth a mention are as follows: - See how far down visitors scroll and see where they abandon the page. - See where users click or move their mouse on the page. - See what parts of your forms people spend more time on or have more difficulty with. - See what content on your page users care less about. If we spend a little more time on this type of user interaction we might very well be able to identify some very pragmatic and beneficial insights.

The only thing that surprised me this weekend more than the fact that Papa Johns were still running deliveries in crazy snow (kudos), was the fact that DNN doesn't make it easy to insert a Paypal form into DNN.

David McKillen WebStrategies Inc.

It’s been around for a little while now but yours truly just came across it and thought it deserved a mention. In this crazy world of social media it’s easy to forget that you are pumping a lot of information into your Online social tools and all in all, if your online data is important to you, Backupify is an easy way to get it back should anything go wrong. Backupify works with Twitter, Google Docs, Wordpress, Gmail, Facebook, Zoho, Delicious, Flickr, Basecamp, Photobucket, Blogger, FriendFeed and more. Obviously data you generate today is not stored on your computer. Granted, it is unlikely that an Online service will simply lose your data, just as it is unlikely that your hard drive will crash if you are good at up keep etc. however it can and does happen all the time. Hackers target these social mediums obviously and so it might be worth considering using something like Backupify. Backupify uses the Amazon cloud to backup your data and the nice thing about this is that should Backupify prove to be a flash in the pan (which seems unlikely) then your data has been stored on a titan of the Internet … and we’d have to hope they make their own backups .

David McKillen WebStrategies Inc.

You can make a difference even just by making Google code available on your site On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti. It's easy to sit back and almost ignore the news reports. In most cases neither you nor people you know have been directly affected, however, as of this moment, estimates of the numbers killed in the Haitian earthquake range from 50,000 to 200,000. Did you know that's about the population of Richmond, VA? It might be a cliche at this stage but even $1 can help and might be the difference in saving another Life. You can join recovery efforts mobilizing around the world to assist earthquake victims and your donation will help disaster victims rebuild their lives and their communities.