The website on the billboard hell.co.nz is a pizza place (and notice the phone number - 0800 666 111). I wish there was one nearby as I can just imagine the fun you could have:
“Where are you off to?”
“I’m going to Hell.”
Or:
“Do you want pizza for dinner?”
“Go to Hell.”
Update: You can find my improved English translation here: http://www.chnorton.com.au/files/xinu/UK.php.txt. It seems Smashing Magazine also appreciate Xinu, see it their in list of web designer checkpoints.
Xinu is a nifty little web application that collects all sorts of information about a URL that you give it - such as Google PageRank, Alexa ranking, a screenshot, W3C validation results, etc - and displays it all on a single page, in a kind of dashboard style layout. It’s very handy for site administrators who want a quick overview (and links to more info) for the status of their pages. You can even create PDF reports.
Whilst the author seems to have somewhat abandoned the project he has released the Xinu code into the world under a Creative Common Attribution 2.5 license, which means people are free to distribute and modify the code as long as credit is given. I can see a few areas where improvements are needed and would be fairly easy, such as improving the English translation which seems to have been done via Google Translate, so I might have a play around with the code and see what I can come up with. From my brief glance at the code, it isn’t great but I didn’t really expect it to be otherwise. After making a few improvements I might even host my own copy for everyone to use.
I actually made a suggestion a while back to improve the layout of the PDF reports but now that the code is open I should do it myself. I also just noticed that my site is shown as invalid XHTML but a visit to the W3C validator site (linked to through Xinu) shows that it is valid so that needs looking at!
This marks the 50th post that I have written for this blog. The inaugural post was published on the 29th of May - almost exactly 3 months ago - which means I should get cracking writing some more! So far there have been 10 comments, including 3 that I wrote myself. Accompanying those are 7 spam comments that were picked up by Akismet, which is an extremely useful plugin.
The blog layout has changed slightly in that time. I have been adding various plugins, such as Similar Posts and WP-Notable (which I later removed as the output didn’t validate) as well as some. I have added in the register/login links to the header, advertising to the post pages and W3C validation links in the footer. I also went into some of the guts of Wordpress and changed the “Read the rest of this entry…” links to take you to the top of the post, rather than at a point after the opening text. I feel this is a better way to go.
Things that still need to be done:
In an interview with J. K. Rowling for the TODAY Show in America, the author has given us some extra tidbits about what has happened with the characters 19 years on.
Yahoo! has released a new Firefox extension called YSlow that plugs into Firebug and gives you additional performance measurements and suggestions for improvement. It measures things like how many HTTP requests your pages requires, whether content is gzipped, if JavaScript files have been minimised and so on. It will give you a quick “grade” for a page to let you judge how many optimisations still need to be performed (my homepage scored a 74 - C; not too shabby).
Even this is not yet a final release it looks extremely promising and is already quite useful as part of the “Firebug suite”. I highly recommend checking it out.