Your browser might be making you slow. Tips for making Firefox faster.

Posted by Colin Clark on Aug 19th, 2010 | View Comments home title

So last night I wrote a pretty angry post about how I believe the internet should be much faster and how the American people are being cheated out of time and sanity and all that, so I did a little research to see if there were some things I could do to increase the speed of my current setup.

I use Firefox as my main web browser, so I googled “tips for making firefox faster”. Turns out there are lots of things you can do to crank up the performance of your web browser. I haven’t checked for similar tips for other browsers, but I’m sure they’re out there as well.

Here’s what I did to make my browsing experience much faster

I enabled pipelining. When your browser calls up a webpage, it typically will send a request, then wait for the answer, then it will send another request, and so on… Well if you enable pipelining, your browser can keep requesting the page over even if it hasn’t received a response yet. This trick alone made pages load much much faster. Here’s how to do it…

Type about:config into the address bar and hit enter. There will be a screen that says you might void your warranty, but I just hit ‘okay’ since I don’t understand how free software could possibly have that good of a warranty. This pulls up a long list of setting that govern how your browser performs.
Find the file labeled network.http.pipelining click on it so instead of ‘false’ it reads ‘true’
Find the file labeled network.http.proxy.pipelining click on it so instead of ‘false’ it reads ‘true’
Find the file labeled network.http.pipelining.maxrequests. Double click the file and it will pull up the number 1 that you will need to change. I read recommendations for anywhere between 8 and 30. This is how many times it will call for a page without hearing a response. Naturally I picked 30, but if you’re scared you can just pick 8.

I set the pages to render quickly. Do you ever notice that when a large webpage loads it will load part of the content, then another part, then another part, etc. Well, did you ever wish that it would just get it over with already!? This is the fix. After I did this, pages typically loaded in 1 or 2 parts instead of 5 or 10, which I greatly appreciated.

Go to the about:config screen again.
Right click somewhere in the window and select New > Integer.
Type content.notify.interval as your preference name.
Enter 500000 and click OK again.
Right-click again in the window and select New > Boolean. Create a value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to True.

Enable faster loading. This was pretty amazing as well. Do you ever notice how your browser gets really sluggish while you’re loading a page. This has always been really annoying to me. Here’s the fix.

Type about:config and press ‘enter’.
Right-click in the window and select New > Integer.
Type content.switch.threshold, click OK
Enter 250000 and click OK to finish.

Increase the cache size. Your browser stores certain elements of webpages you visit frequently in a cache so that it can load the page more quickly. Bigger cache = more stuff that can be called up more quickly. This works best if you have 2+ gigs of RAM on your machine.

Type about:config and press ‘enter’.
Right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Integer.
Type browser.cache.memory.capacity, click ‘ok’.
Enter 65536 and click ‘ok’.
Restart your browser.

I got a lot of these tips from TechRadar.com, they had a few others as well, but they were pretty specialized and not really great for most modern web users (just my opinion). Anyway, enjoy a faster experience on the web and let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

Why is the Internet so freakin slow? and probably the biggest business idea ever.

Posted by Colin Clark on Aug 18th, 2010 | View Comments home title

If you go to web design and development blogs (six revisions and smashing magazine are two good ones) you’ll see the writers going on and on about the great new technologies that are even as we speak expanding the functional capabilities of the web. I worry though….

I worry because it seems that in the last few years the Internet has gotten slower and slower. This slowness comes from two sources. 1) Developers are figuring out how to extend the functionality of what can be done in your browser to a staggering degree. and 2) Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) are either unwilling or unable to keep up.

I still remember back in the early 2000′s at the time of the .com bubble burst. I had just gone to college and tasted my first non-dialup high-speed internet connection. There was way more bandwidth than the market required (one of the causes of the crash) and things online were good. We weren’t watching much video online or using many complex web apps, so basic surfing and content consumption was an absolute joy.

But now look at us. We’re addicted to web apps like twitter and facebook, we spend all our time online, and we’re absolutely clogging the pipes that make the Internet work.

So why is this an amazing business opportunity?

This is a HUGE problem and it’s only getting huger. If anyone out there has a good solution I can almost guarantee that there are plenty of investors who would give it a shot.

The future will very likely look nothing like the present. We need new and innovative solutions. We need new options for getting connected. We need someone to do for Internet service what Vonage did for phone service, which means thinking about it in an entirely new way.

Managing multiple email addresses the easy way – Gmail Tutorial

Posted by Colin Clark on Aug 6th, 2010 | View Comments home title

Gmail (google’s email product) is a fantastic, versitile and free tool for staying productive with your email duties. However not everyone is aware how easy it is to manage multiple email addresses from a single gmail account.

Let’s say you’re like me and you’re involved in multiple organizations… I’ve got a few different email addresses: colin@tribeswell.com for my primary business, colin@mwmcmusic.com for my music business, and I also manage email accounts for info@tribeswell.com and booking@mwmwcmusic.com. I can manage all four of these accounts right from a single gmail account.

Here’s how you pull it off…

Log into your gmail account and click the ‘settings’ tab in the top right corner.
Look for the tabs in the yellow section of the screen that say ‘general’, ‘labels’, ‘accounts and import’, etc. Click the ‘accounts and import tab’.
The second section down on the next page you get to should be labeled ‘send mail as’. In this section there is a large button that says ‘send mail from another address’. Click this button.
A new window will pop up asking you which name and email you want to send emails from. Enter your name and the email address you want to use. Click ‘next step’.
The next screen gives you the option to send emails through gmail or through your domain’s SMTP servers. I like to use gmail, because it is way easier and seems to work great for most needs, so select ‘Send through Gmail’.
A screen will pop up asking if you want to send a verification email. Click ‘send verification’.
Gmail will send you an email with a verification code, so check your other email, and copy the code by highlighting it and pressing ctrl+c (or command+c if you’re on a mac). Then paste the code (ctrl or command + v) into the next screen that pops up and hit ‘verify’. The popup window will close.
Go back to the original gmail settings screen and your new email should be added to the list with your original gmail address.
Now the only thing left to do is go into your old email address and tell it to forward all email to your gmail address. This step will vary in compexity based on your particular email system, but can usually be performed fairly simply in the settings or options panel. I like to have it forward the email to gmail and then delete the copy that’s in the old system, but that’s just me. You can forward it however you like.

Now when you go to compose an email you’ll have a dropdown that allows you to select witch email you’d like to send it from. Pretty cool eh?

Setup Multiple Email Addresses in Gmail (crenk.com)
Create a Gmail Filter to Focus on your Most Important Emails … (tehranpi.net)
How to Sign in to Multiple Gmail Accounts (googletutor.com)

Months ago I pushed for to eliminate the word ‘social media’ and now @garyvee thinks so too.

Posted by Colin Clark on Aug 4th, 2010 | View Comments home title

I think this marks the 3rd or 4th time that I’ve went on the rampage against the term ‘social media’. I especially hate this term when it relates to marketing. Today I ran across this video post by Gary Vaynerchuk where he totally agrees with me.

Here’s the dealio… You can use various ‘online social mediums’ to get your ideas out about new products. You can use them as a customer service aid or as a market research tool, but symantically speaking, THERE IS NO POSSIBLE WAY THAT AN ORGANIZATION CAN CREATE SOCIAL MEDIA.

This is the other part of the word social media that I hate. It throws the word media around in completely nonsensical ways. Media would be things like text articles, audio recordings, static images, or movies. Social media would be when people (not organizations), collaborate to create or modify some sort of media product.

The tools that enable this creation are ‘social mediums’ just like tv is a video medium, radio is a sound medium, and newspapers are a print medium. Facebook is a social medium, because it allows users to create media in a social way. I type a short blurb. My friends comment on it. I post a picture of my friends, my friends tag themselves in it.

So when @comcastcares uses twitter, a social medium, to solve a customer’s problem, the PERSON who is operating the @comcastcares account and the person with the problem are creating media together. Sure, comcast’s brand is a part of that, but the ‘social media’ is created between 2 or more humans using a ‘social medium’.

So enough of that… here’s Gary’s video

@Garyvee: High-energy social media maven (news.cnet.com)
Dealing With Employees Who Are Social Media Celebrities (socialmediaexaminer.com)
Thinkers and Doers ” Blog Archive ” Evolving Social Media in the Enterprise (blogs.waggeneredstrom.com)

Is WordPress secure? Is it good for website owners? Is it good for users?

Posted by Colin Clark on Jul 30th, 2010 | View Comments home title

There’s been quite a bit of trash-talking about wordpress in the last few months and I felt that since Tribeswell builds all of its websites in wordpress, I should weigh in.

For those of you who don’t know, wordpress is a software program that acts as a framework for building and managing a website. This is known as a content management system or CMS for short. Currently wordpress is the most popular and widely used CMS in the world.

WordPress is also an open-sourced software product, which means it is free for anyone to download and modify the software to suite their individual needs. Because of this, a vibrant developer community exists that provides thousands of add-ons and extensions for wordpress that allow it to perform a staggering variety of complex functions.

Web Developers and designers (typically) LOVE wordpress for all of the above reasons. We don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add a new feature to a website. There is a good chance that another developer has already solved the problem for us.

So back to the initial questions…

Is WordPress Secure?

WordPress is a software product that lives on the internet. Like any other online tool, it is vulnerable to attack from hackers or viruses. Let me reiterate… ANY online tool can become compromised by hackers or viruses.

Fortunately there are lots of things you can do to prevent your wordpress website from being attacked. In fact, if your wordpress software and plugins are up to date, and you have strong passwords for your admins, it is very unlikely that you will ever have problems.

As I mentioned earlier, WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, therefore more websites use it, and there are more stories about its vulnerabilities than other less popular CMS’s. You should also consider the source of much of the negative press about wordpress. It usually comes from people who have their own proprietary systems that compete with wordpress.

Is wordpress good for website owners?

If you look around, you can easily find countless CMS solutions that are easier to use than wordpress. You can also find CMS solutions that have more functions and can do more things. However, wordpress occupies a unique niche in that it is fairly easy to use and also performs a wide array of functions.

No CMS solution is right for EVERY application, and there are some things for which wordpress is not ideally suited (ecommerce for example), but for the average website, wordpress is an excellent option, because of its fantastic balance between high funtionality and ease of use.

Is wordpress good for users?

By users I mean the people that visit your site.

WordPress allows developers to create websites that delight users. Granted, a great website can be made from most any CMS solution, but wordpress is unique in that there are so many design resources, pre-built themes, and modules that it is very easy to create a full-featured website that will impress your core users.

A well-built wordpress site loads quickly, is easily searchable, and often includes great functionality due to the wide array of plugins and extensions available.

So in conclusion…

If someone tells you that wordpress is not a good website solution, make sure you do your research. I think you’ll find that there are a lot of good reasons why it is the most popular CMS in the world and there are lots of simple things you can do to avoid security issues.