Category: Internet

How Disqus Went Realtime with 165K Messages Per Second and Less than .2 Seconds Latency

April 30, 2014 / Daniel / 0 Comments

How do you add realtime functionality to a web scale application? That’s what Adam Hitchcock, a Software Engineer at Disqus talks about in an excellent talk: Making DISQUS Realtime (slides). Disqus had to take their commenting system and add realtime capabilities to it. Not something that’s easy to do when at the time of the talk (2013) they had had just hit a billion unique visitors a month. What Disqus developed is a realtime commenting system called “realertime” that was tested to handle 1.5 million concurrently connected users, 45,000 new connections per second, 165,000 messages/second, with less than .2 seconds latency end-to-end. The nature of a commenting system is that it is IO bound and has a high fanout, that is a …

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How Disqus Went Realtime with 165K Messages Per Second and Less than .2 Seconds Latency

How to Look at Your Website the Way Google Does

April 30, 2014 / Paul / 0 Comments

When you spend months or years on a website, not to mention thousands of dollars, it’s hard to step back and look at it objectively. Can you look at it through the eyes of your users? Can you look at it the way Google does? If you can look at your website the way Google does, you’ll probably discover areas in which your website needs work. So in that spirit, I’m going to teach you how you can see your website from Google’s perspective, and how you can then target the areas that need improvement. First, Google finds your website In order to see your website, Google needs to find it. When you create a website, Google will discover it eventually.

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How to Look at Your Website the Way Google Does

Why Users Aren’t Clicking Your Home Page Carousel

April 30, 2014 / Paul / 0 Comments

by anthony on 04/29/14 at 10:19 am

A website study found that out of 3 million home page visits only about 1% clicked a carousel slide. How could a large, graphical element on the home page get such few clicks? The reason most carousels do poorly might surprise you. Most carousels have multiple slides that rotate when users click the navigation arrow. The first slide always gets the most clicks. But the click-through rate for every slide after that will suffer a steep drop. The problem with the low click-through rate is not the carousel pattern itself, but the carousel navigation. The navigation arrows on a carousel don’t give users an incentive to click. It fails because an arrow affordance doesn’t describe the information users get …

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Why Users Arenâ€™t Clicking Your Home Page Carousel

SearchCap: Google’s Secret Translate Service, Animated 3D Maps & Bing Wake Times

April 30, 2014 / Paul / 0 Comments

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing: The Earliest & Latest Searchers By CityMicrosoft Bing posted data on the earliest risers by city based on Bing usage data. Bing said they thought it would be interesting to look at Bing usage as a proxy for when people get online, start work or otherwise wake up. The earliest city to rise is San Francisco, reaching 50% of Bing traffic – How To Amp Up Your User Engagement (And Get More Links)People like to link to content that shows signs of life. If you have an active community, people are more likely to return often…

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SearchCap: Google’s Secret Translate Service, Animated 3D Maps & Bing Wake Times

Redesigning The Country Selector

April 28, 2014 / Daniel / 0 Comments

Advertisement The country selector. It’s there when you create an account for a new Web service, check out of an e-commerce store or sign up for a conference. The normal design? A drop-down list with all of the available countries. However, when conducting a large session of user testing on check-out usability (which we wrote about here on Smashing Magazine back in April 2011), we consistently found usability issues with the massive country selector drop-downs. Jakob Nielsen reported similar issues as far back as 2000 and 2007 when testing drop-downs with a large number of options, such as state and country lists. So, this past summer we set out to redesign the country selector. This article focuses on the four design iterations we …

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Redesigning The Country Selector