Fancy a Nibble?

Sean Hamill — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:10:02 +0000

Some of you may remember Silktide’s excellent (free) Sitescore utility which was withdrawn a year or two ago, presumably due to the enormous amount of bandwidth being consumed by it. The premise was simple, type in your site’s url, hit enter, wait a few minutes and BAM! there’s your website summed up in a number between 0 and 10. Usually this would be followed by a look of dismay as you see a couple of hundred infractions in the breakdown of Sitescore’s analysis of your website. Although no ratings-based tool can ever judge how good or bad your website will perform in the real world, Sitescore was a useful all-in-one code validator, content scanner and backlink checker that pointed out the areas where your site fell short. And now its back, well, kind of.

Nibbler is Sitescore’s little baby brother, offering you just a tiny glimpse of what you will get when you sign up for Silktide’s professional analysis package Siteray. It’s still in ‘alpha’ stage of the development and will only test 5 pages of your site but, despite this, I have found myself using Nibbler everyday since I discovered it’s existence. The only problem I have with Nibbler (and also previously with Sitescore) is the damned addictive nature of it’s rating system that has you chasing every single infraction in your site’s code to get a higher score. Forgot to explicitly define the size of all your images? Tut tut. You lose one point there. Using the same meta tags for more than one page? You lose another point there, bub. And so on.

Nibbler, thankfully, doesn’t have a league table (as did Sitescore) so there’s no, “If I can just break into the top 100, I’ll be happy”, thoughts going through your head when you use it. Having said that, seeing your site work it’s way up the league table was half the fun so I’m posting my best score here and everyone else is welcome to do the same. Just don’t get too addicted to it…

Stating the obvious

Sean Hamill — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:54:13 +0000

Blogging is not easy.

Well ok, its not that hard either, but I can assure you that keeping a blog up to date and, more importantly, interesting to read, is not as simple as it may seem. Having previously blogged under a different guise for a number of years (with a moderate degree of success – that is, if you can call offending 10-15 people a day success), I’m somewhat apprehensive about beginning a new blog, albeit one that will have (should have) a more consistent theme, i.e. web design-y stuff.

Having said that, I don’t feel there’s very much I can offer readers here that hasn’t already been mentioned somewhere else, so I’ll try to provide some level of entertainment to go with my otherwise handed-down web design tips. The site itself is still a bit rough around the edges, but feel free to poke around and *ahem* drop me a line if you need some webby work sorted!

Clicapic Media

Fancy a Nibble?

Stating the obvious