November 26, 2001– Newsletter #158

Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors,

Did you hear…

Hooray for the U.S. congress. The tax moratorium that
died a few weeks ago has been given new life. It’s two
more years, as I understand it. President Bush said he’d
sign the bill into law.

The Federal Trade Commission has sent out around 40
email warnings to Web sites selling unproven Anthrax
cures and test kits. The basic warning is, “shut down or
face legislation.”

USA Today ran a story about how high-tech methods of
spying on terrorist’s financial dealing failed because the
terrorists aren’t using high-tech methods. It seems the
sneaks came in under the radar by using pencil and paper.
We were looking for encrypted wire transfers and the
terrorists were filling out deposit slips. Maybe we should
try the military tactic, “Hey, you’re shoe’s untied.”

Now on to today’s topic…

What’s more important? Is it the news or the
advertisers?

I am teaching a news writing class this semester. The
terrorist attacks have been both awful and helpful for the
class. Students seem much more interested in the news
going on around them.

One notion that came up again and again was the fact
that, right after the attacks on 9/11, the major networks
eschewed commercials for coverage. The students
pointed it out pretty quickly. Almost 72 hours went by
before any regular commercial schedule was being
followed. The loss of money must have been staggering.

I never thought of it before, but that same commercial for
coverage element must have also hit the Web. The hit,
however, must have been even more devastating for news
servers. Let me explain what I mean.

When September 11th hit, news sites saw an
unprecedented spike in visitor-ship. That meant more
people attempting to get more pages. Common sense
says that people will need to wait longer to see a page
because so many other people also want to see that page.
The server is serving more requests. Things slow down.

If you’re the Webmaster of a site, you want to
accommodate as many of these requests as possible. So,
what do you do? Yes, you could buy a bigger server and
get more bandwidth and a few other suggestions that
would take a great deal of time and money, but think
short term…very short term. What would you do right
off the bat?

Make the pages smaller in terms of bytes.

That makes sense, yes? If the page is normally 50K,
somehow knock it down to 20K and things will speed up.
In the time it took the server to serve one customer a 50K
page, theoretically now two and a half users could be
served.

I know a few half users…they’re weird people.

Now, since we all agree that smaller pages will make for
faster delivery, how can one greatly lighten the byte load
and not kill any of the content the users so desperately
want to get their eyes on?

Kill the advertising.

There’s your short-and-sweet answer. Kill the
advertising and the page most likely drops to half its
original size. If you kill some of the additional graphic
support like a background or a secondary logo, you cut
the bytes even further.

“That’ll never happen,” many of you are now saying.

On the contrary, it did. News-based Websites learned
from 9/11 and when Flight 578 crashed into Rockaway,
Queens the sites knew the news spike would be
tremendous.

The spike caused a slowdown on all major news Web
sites. The New York Times reported that page delivery
went from an average of 3 seconds to over 23 seconds
immediately following the news story breaking. MSNBC
claimed service slowed to over 26 seconds per page.

CNN dropped it advertising and graphic support
dramatically right after the crash. Newsday dropped all
advertising and still crashed due to over-use.

In these times of news uncertainty, Web sites are
incorporating new hardware and writing new policies
regarding what to do when the spike hits, and it will hit
again and again.

It just goes to show that even when the Internet is having
trouble making financial ends meet, when in all comes
down to brass tacks, content is more important than
graphical support or advertising.

I try to bang that point home every week in my Web
design classes. Content is king. Get it right and almost
everything else can go away. Get it right and you will
succeed.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

That’s that. Thanks for reading.

Joe Burns, Ph.D.

And remember: I love facts like the one I’ll use today. I
guarantee I’ll get a bunch of letters telling me I’m wrong,
so here goes. In Great Britain, giving the “V” sign with
the first and middle finger while the palm is turned
towards you and raising your hand is a rather rude
gesture. It’s akin to the middle finger here in the states,
among other areas. The British “V” gesture has its roots
in the battle of Agincourt in 1415. The story goes that the
French threatened to chop off British archer’s bow
fingers during battle. When all was said and done, the
French lost and British archers gave the now famous “V”
signal to mock their defeated foes.