We’ve been receiving traffic here and there from Spoke.com and I’m really not sure why. The site is a piss-poor rip off of LinkedIN plus its’ loaded with inaccurate information.

For our company, Spoke is listing the names of two of our clients as Imulus employees. I see a problem here because Spoke is giving false data; and therefore misrepresenting a company profile. To me, Spoke feels like an spam outfit, setup to capture the names and emails of various corporate accounts. I’ll explain why:

1. In an effort to correct the data I created an account; now they have my contact information.
2. Upon confirming my account; I was redirected to the Spoke Web site, asked to complete a basic profile, but rather then COMPLETE / SIGN-UP or SUBMIT, my option was to “Install Windows Toolbar.” OK, now that is shady.
3. When I attempt to modify the company data, I’m greeted with a pop-up form stripped of all browser controls. The form fails to validate my completed fields, then it tells me to click “back” on my browser…. hello, you removed my browser controls!

Please tell me I’m wrong, but so far I feel like I’ve given my information to a spammer.

A few months ago we moved our website from Alentus to Sungard (formly Inflow), with what we thought was great success. The latency between our office and our dedicated server was cut in half. When we accessed the server from various connections such as Qwest and Comcast our download rates were far improved. Then one day we received a call from a client saying that since we moved them into our new facility, they’ve received increased complaints of download failures.

Our initial response was one of skepticism because we were seeing improved performance, not a decrease. Using terminal services to connect to our other dedicated servers around the country I was able to reproduce the client’s experience. Apparently, about 70% of traffic around the country was having difficulty or decreased performance while accessing our servers. I then stumbled on a tool called Website Pulse.

Website Pulse monitors your website for performance and related issues from various locations internationally. In the chart below you can see the results of downloading a 22 MB file from our servers. The numbers on the left are seconds needed to download a file from Chicago over a backbone provided by nLayer, Level3, UUNET. The drop in seconds occurred when we moved our servers out of Sungard and into ViaWest in Denver, CO. The sudden increase on the 5th of October was an issue with the switch used in our rack.

Unknown to us, when Sungard acquired Inflow they also changed their policy in regards to capping bandwidth. Rather then allowing for bandwidth overages, and then surcharging the customer; Sungard’s policy was to cap bandwidth and not tell the customer of the performance hit.

Prior to this issue we didn’t realize various locations around the country experienced our websites in such a wide variety of speeds. With Website Pulse we receive alerts when any of our sites a falling below our acceptable load times.

It’s a great tool and I highly recommend using it for website monitoring.

A while ago I posted a blog about image retargeting, a new form of image resizing that uses algorithms to determine what part of the image is most important and what can be stripped away during resizing.

And while the video helped illustrate the concept of image retargeting, it didn’t allow for first hand usage of the technique. Therefore I would like to direct your attention to riszr.com. An online flash application that allows you to upload images and resize them using retargeting (along with the normal methods). Then you can save your retargeted image out.

Rsizr.com is really well done, and greatly helps to demonstrate just how beneficial and powerful image retargeting is. It even offers advanced features such as area selection for retargeting protection. A technique that allows you to select parts of the image and protect them from being retargeted. Head on over to www.rsizr.com and give it a whirl.

Seems the good people at TorrentSpy have decided to stop letting US users search the TorrentSpy site due to uncertainty around US privacy laws. While I can certainly understand TorrentSpy’s position, I don’t like the fact that our country continues to try to apply laws which are out-dated. Like many out there when I’m told I can’t have something; it makes me want it more.

So I say, if you can’t search in the US, then just move to another country, virtually. Visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org) and download their TOR Onion router. If you follow their instructions the TOR Onion will route your internet connection through several random servers in various countries, thereby giving websites like TorrentSpy the appearance that you are in another country.

It’s a simple way to bypass the system. Better yet, donate to the EFF and help them protect our freedoms online.

Here at Imulus we recently set a goal to streamline our design and development process by creating templates for starting a new project. As a first step in this process I coded out a simple HTML / CSS example page that offers information on basic HTML elements and what CSS can do to them.

It contains visual examples for the following:

• font rendering (PC and Mac)
• link styling
• heading styling
• list styling
• border style options
• and table styling

You can download this cheat sheet in zip format or view it online. Enjoy!