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To all the Chinese members of this board, a quick request. I'm performing a series of tests on a university website and want to ascertain if it can be accessed from all parts of China. So far, sites like JustPing have reported success from major cities like Shanghai, Beijing etc. I'd still like to go ahead and get a report from the average user. The link to the website is: http://www.stamford.edu/ While replying back, please include: Name of your city / town and province Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) Thanks for your time,m^e

To all the Chinese members of this board, a quick request. I'm performing a series of tests on a university website and want to ascertain if it can be accessed from all parts of China. So far, sites like JustPing have reported success from major cities like Shanghai, Beijing etc. I'd still like to go ahead and get a report from the average user. The link to the website is: http://www.stamford.edu/ While replying back, please include: Name of your city / town and province Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) Thanks for your time,m^e

Hey all, I'm working on a University website and trying to optimize it (performance wise) according to the Yahoo Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website guide. So far I've to tweak a whole bunch of settings adhering to those rules and achieved pretty good grade for the site (according to YSlow). What I intend to do now is measure the site load speed from various parts of the world. As there are no conceivable way of doing so sitting in a particular country, I request the board members to help me out a bit with this. For measuring the load time, unless you're a scriptie, you'll probably have to resort to a plain old stopwatch (which is a part and parcel of all mobile phones these days). The information I need from you is: Approximate load times for the front page (cached and non-cached) Country you are from Your internet link speed Browser make (IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome etc.) and Version Here's what you should do: Clear your browser Cache - I guess most of you know how to do that. If not write back. Type the URL: http://www.stamford.edu/ - but don't load it yet Fire up your stopwatch and press Enter to start loading the site Stop the stopwatch as soon as loading completes and take the reading. That should be your non-cached load time. Now repeat the process above once more. It should be a whole lot quicker this time as most of the site will be read from the cache. This is the cached load time. Once you've got both the readings, please post back here along with the information I've requested. Thanks a million to all the participants in this survey and looking forward to your active response. Cheers, m^e P.S. If you want to get an approximate timings for your own site from a single source autonomously, you should try this new and really cool tool fromPingdom. The service is hosted in Sweden.

Hey all, I'm working on a University website and trying to optimize it (performance wise) according to the Yahoo Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website guide. So far I've to tweak a whole bunch of settings adhering to those rules and achieved pretty good grade for the site (according to YSlow). What I intend to do now is measure the site load speed from various parts of the world. As there are no conceivable way of doing so sitting in a particular country, I request the board members to help me out a bit with this. For measuring the load time, unless you're a scriptie, you'll probably have to resort to a plain old stopwatch (which is a part and parcel of all mobile phones these days). The information I need from you is: Approximate load times for the front page (cached and non-cached) Country you are from Your internet link speed Browser make (IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome etc.) and Version Here's what you should do: Clear your browser Cache - I guess most of you know how to do that. If not write back. Type the URL: http://www.stamford.edu/- but don't load it yet Fire up your stopwatch and press Enter to start loading the site Stop the stopwatch as soon as loading completes and take the reading. That should be your non-cached load time. Now repeat the process above once more. It should be a whole lot quicker this time as most of the site will be read from the cache. This is the cached load time. Once you've got both the readings, please post back here along with the information I've requested. Thanks a million to all the participants in this survey and looking forward to your active response. Cheers, m^e P.S. If you want to get an approximate timings for your own site from a single source autonomously, you should try this new and really cool tool from Pingdom. The service is hosted in Sweden.

Between <head></head> tags of all your pages There's this alternative to the conversion tool at DynamicDrive - works all the same and converts any a png to a favicon and vice-versa: http://convertico.com/

Google most likely does it using the combination of cookies and a Geo-IP service. First when you type Google.com and your browser doesn't contain any cookies set by them, the redirection occurs according to your IP (ISP) location and the cookie for the same is set in your browser. If you set the google domain for another language as your preferred one, the cookie is altered accordingly. Next visit onwards you are auto-redirected based on the cookie. I'm following a similar model here - and you've brought up a good point. Maybe I should try analyzing the headers and see how they're performing the redirection. Thanks, m^e

Aha MC Long time.... Yup! For content negotiation I'm relying mostly on cookies and sessions... if either are found, the site redirs to a particular lang version automatically... That part is taken care of. However, it's the redirection issue - for people who arrive at the primary domain - that's got me a little baffled.. It's not a 301 for sure, coz that would imply xxx.com = xxx.com/en (in my case). to a search engine crawler... which is not quite correct, if you know what I mean! Studying the different header types - 300 seems to be the only logical choice, but I didn't manage to find any hands-on (code) examples of implementation. So am kind of unsure if I'm doing it right! Good to see you around Cheers, m^e

Hey guys! I'm designing this multi-lingual site with php + mysql. I'm using a 2 letter language code following the domain name to identify the language the content is delivered in. For example, domain.com/en/ - English domain.com/th/ - Thai and so on... All URLs (am utilizing mod_rewrite) take the general form, http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/Here's my problem scenario: When person A visits the site by keying in http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/, I can directly serve the pages in the desired language. If person A keys in just http://www.domain.com/ (without any language code), I redirect to the english page by default - but I'm in a dilemma as to what redirection header to serve for this URL. I had read about a '300 Multiple Choice" header and that's what I have implemented experimentally. Here's the code: header( 'HTTP/1.1 300 Multiple Choices' );header( 'Location: ' . DOMAIN . '/en' ); Is this the correct way to do it? I had thought of using a 301 earlier on - but that didn't strike quite right. Has anyone worked on such a case and can throw some light on this? Thanks, m^e P.S. And don't gawk at me Been keeping ultra-busy doin' some hardcore php!

Thanks guys! I managed to implement it successfully with all the help I got here :oCheers,m^e

You should go tell that to some of the coders in the larger corps. You'll die 10 deaths in a single night trying to go through 1 page of their code. Anyone else would care to share some thoughts on my site? Thanks, m^e

The above JS method will work 100%. I wonder though, if you pull-in your own CSS using a custom blogger template (those XML files) - and define the same CSS block there, will it override the blogger's navbar... or resorting to JS is the only way to go. My point is, your CSS will load AFTER the default Blogger's CSS. So in effect, it should be able to overcome the one of blogger. Any thoughts on this ?Cheers,m^e

And it's back again !!! Surprisingly not a single post anywhere on the net regarding this... probably says that no one cares about the site much

Any bloggers here who had listed his/her blog on BlogHub.Com? I had mine listed and had their badge on my blog - but over past 4-5 days, the badge graphic wouldn't come up. Last night I checked on the site and it's totally down. Traceroute cannot even do a single hop. It's like the site totally went off the radar and vanished into nothingness...No news on the net about it either.. anyone's got any idea what happened to it?Cheers,m^e

Guys, thanks for the reviews tansqrx: Even I had horrific CSS skills, till one of our oldies, Twitch pushed me in the right direction. What I did was started copying templates.. i.e. if I came across a site I liked, I'd try to design it myself.. without studying the code of the site at all. That helped big-time in figuring out all the nuances of CSS. I'm still far from perfect (I'd rate my knowledge at best at 50%) - but I can more of less emulate any given site these days. Mordent: That's another thing I picked-up along the way. I really wanted my WordPress theme to be unique.. It's actually pretty easy. You can have a basic WordPress theme up and running with just 3-4 files. Studying the inner workings of other themes help a lot too. And dude !!! You're posting here in a no credits forum.. docduke: Thanks for that bit of info on autostereograms. Am off to notch-off another post on it And the Firefox download was a total massacre. I couldn't get it at all last night. Finally saw your post and managed to connect to the Europe server - but even there I was getting a maxed download speed of 5kbps !!!! Today, the localized version Web-page seems to be working much better - but the main sites, i.e. SpreadFirefox and GetFirefox are still blown out to bits Who needs a DDOS??