Category: Social Media

Bristol Pound – a great concept but a flawed web launch

I was drawn to the Bristol Pound project by a tweet that I spotted at lunchtime today.

The concept is simple:

  • Launch a local currency to help support the local economy in Bristol.
  • Encourage people to support local businesses.
  • Boost local spending power and lock money into the Bristol economy.

This all sounds great, but I just went to their website at  https://bristolpound.org  and the page took more than 3 minutes to download. Now I’m not blessed with the world’s fastest Internet connection in the office, but that’s a lot longer than most people are prepared to wait.

I was reminded of a couple of StrangeLoop infographics:

The first one describes web user’s boredom thresholds and shows that people abandon slow sites quickly, many never return and even worse, they tell their friends about their bad experience. This can be very damaging for a brand that puts so much effort into their day 1 launch.

User boredom thresholds - infographic

The second infographic documents the increasing size of pages over time. I know that we all use high speed internet connections nowadays, but if a lot of people start to hit your site, you’re going to run out of bandwidth to serve the requests pretty quickly.

I think that the Bristol Pound website is suffering from “page bloat” and here’s why…

Using a Firefox browser with an empty cache and Firebug, I connected to http://bristolpound.org and saw that it took almost 3 minutes for the page to download completely. The page looks great and is graphically rich, but it doesn’t perform well for those first-time visitors hitting the site today.

The image below which is taken from the HAR (HTTP archive) file that I created shows a single image taking 2.33 (139 seconds) minutes to download. The large/slow image is called FINAL_Launch_POSTER_copy.jpg , and it is advertising tonight’s launch party for the Bristol Pound.

The main problem with this image is that somebody has uploaded the full size image to the website and rescaled it using HTML. The original image size is 3,508 x 4,966 pixels which is huge, but it is displayed at only 338 x 495 pixels. Serving a scaled-down image could save 1.8MB of bandwidth for each page request (a 99% size reduction). This would reduce the download time for this component from about 139 seconds to less than 2 seconds. This alone would significantly improve user’s first impressions of the site.

This screenshot shows the “offending image” highlighted in red.

There are other improvements that could be made, but to improve performance for now, I’d simply resize the image in an image editor (MSPAINT would do) and then keep my fingers crossed…..

A great (free) way to receive SMS alerts

Introduction
For some time, I’ve been using IFTTT (if this then that) to simplify my online existence. For those of you who don’t know IFTTT is a free online service that monitors various information feeds and takes action when particular condition is met.

IFTTT describes these rules as “recipes” and a variety of different triggers can be used to prompt an action.

IFTTT sample recipe
IFTTT supports a variety of channels which can be used as triggers. Some are relatively simple such as date/time triggers; for example you may want to receive an email a few days before an important birthday. Others are more complex; for example you could use a trigger to notify you by SMS when you’re tagged in a Facebook photograph. Users can share recipes that they create with the wider IFTTT user base.

My problem
I’m a director of Vivit, the HP Software User Group and one of my responsibilities is social media, this means that I share some responsibility for the Vivit website.

Last week I was on holiday when the site suffered a temporary outage. This was due to a hardware failure and was rapidly resolved by our hosting provider. This got me thinking about how I could ensure that I received alerts when I didn’t have access to my Vivit email account.

Our site uptime is monitored using a free service from monitor.us and various Vivit directors receive email alerts in the event of a problem. I wanted to ensure that as well as the emails, I received SMS notifications of these problems.

The solution
I already had a gmail account and I arranged for email messages from monitor.us to be forwarded to my Gmail account. I gave IFTTT access to my gmail inbox and created a recipe to ask it to look for emails from [email protected] (this is the account used by monitor.us for alerts).

My IFTTT recipe

Now each time that I receive an email alert, I get an SMS.

IFTTT checks my email every 15 minutes, which is more regularly than I check my own email. I have found this to be a pretty good way of keeping informed about problems.

LinkedIn “InMaps”…. what does yours look like ?

LinkedIn InMaps  interactive visual representations of your LinkedIn connections, based on the relationships between your connections. LinkedIn uses information about how people in your network are connected to you and each other to create your individual map. Groups like colleagues, people you went at school with, or friends are separated into colour-coded clusters, as people within these groups are also interconnected with each other. My colour-coded groups include P&P, Acuma, HP, Intechnica as well as Lloyds and HBOS.

Here’s a link to my map.
http://wp.me/p2ADxu-5f

People with more connections are represented by larger dots and hovering over the dots allows you to see the names of connected people. Clicking on those names shows you other people that they’re connected to visually. This is a great way to understand your network and reconnect with those people and groups that you’re losing touch with,

As well as being a useful tool, it can come up with some surprises….

Here’s my current map.

I couldn’t help thinking that it looks rather like a dog!