We specialise in dynamic websites, online stores and E-newsletters.

Watchmouse, who we use to monitor our client’s web sites (and obviously our servers) introduced some interesting statistics over the summer. They monitor our web sites from checkpoint’s all over the world and notify us within seconds by email if any of the monitoring stations detect a significant slow down. They also have some great Apple Mac desktop widgets which allow us to see at any time the health of all our web sites and servers. From approximately 60 web sites on 5 servers I think we’ve only experienced one hour of downtime combined over the entire last year: that’s better than 99.9% of the time.

It’s also very reassuring when they email you back to tell you the site’s are back up too! Although judging from the research they have conducted analysing the average performance of all the web sites they monitor we don’t have to worry about this so much. They say Open Source web sites are more reliable and load faster than Windows-based websites, and they all say the web server we use outperforms those on Microsoft based web servers. They say that in this country big business tends to prefer Microsoft based solutions, but that in fact they would be better off using Linux/Apache solutions - it’s no surprise it’s the kind of technology that powers the major internet companies web sites around the world.

You can leverage that performance and up-time by ensuring you deliver your next web site using this technology too.

You can read the full article here, and don’t forget to sign up for Watchmouse to check your websites too - and when you need to switch to Linux, get in touch.

Thanks to the fact that the latest web browsers support Open Standards in certain places it means that we can develop simple little tools to make our lives easier. The OpenSearch standard allows us to create a little piece of code which tells your web browser to add a new search engine to the little search box in the top right hand corner (which normally defaults to searching Google). Well if you have Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 then opening this file will add the ability to search the php website directly from your browser (php is the code we use to make interesting web sites).

If you’re not so technically minded this file will let you do the same on the Multimap web site - give it a go, you can easily uninstall them if you don’t like them and you never know it may make your life just that little bit easier. We created these two this morning but there are a whole host of other ones at the Mycroft web site.