Loading 2024 Quotes

Site Speed I’ll be brutal here. There’s absolutely no excuse why your web pages should be loading in more than 5 seconds. Google users will simply vote with their ‘back’ button. They have no loyalty to your site over the nine other organic options on the first page and they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about your entrepreneurial aspirations. If a web page is slow, they’ll bounce off that website quicker than said rat up a drainpipe. And you remember what we said about RankBrain monitoring your site’s bounce rate? And the ramifications of it being poor? “No Bueno” my friend. As you may be able to tell, I get very worked up about site speed. I think making your website lightning fast is one of the most undervalued marketing tactics you can perform on the Internet; not just for your SEO, but for increasing website conversions. People don’t realise how strict the correlation between site load speed times and customer sales really is. it’s often the case that website owners don’t realise they behave online in exactly the same way their potential customers will. Do you yourself wait for a website to load for ages, or do you just skip to the next option? Precisely.

For Dads Helping Ease Her Quease Morning sickness is one pregnancy symptom that definitely doesn’t live up to its name. It’s a 24/7 experience that can send your spouse running to the bathroom morning, noon, and night—and hugging the toilet far more than she’ll be hugging you. So take steps to help her feel better—or at least not worse. Lose the aftershave that she suddenly finds repulsive, and get your onion ring fix out of her sniffing range (thanks to her hormones, her sense of smell is supersized). Fill her gas tank so she doesn’t have to come nose-to-nozzle with the fumes at the pump. Fetch her foods that quell her queasies and don’t provoke another run to the toilet. Good choices include ginger ale, soothing smoothies, and crackers (but ask first—what spells r-e-l-i-e-f for one queasy woman spells v-o-m-i-t for another). Encourage her to eat small meals throughout the day instead of 3 large ones (spreading out the load and keeping her tummy filled may ease her nausea), but don’t chide her for her food choices (now’s not the time to nag her about eating her broccoli). Be there for support when she’s throwing up—hold back her hair, bring her some ice water, rub her back. And remember, no jokes. If you were throwing up for weeks, you wouldn’t find it amusing. Not surprisingly, neither does she.

Even before you get to any serious software engineering, the applied part of computing involves a neverending struggle to make machines do what you need them to do—get a document to print, a website to load, a software package to install—in ways that are harrowing and not the slightest bit intellectually interesting. You learn, not about the nature of reality, but only about the terrible design decisions of other people. (“On being faceless”, blog post on March 6, 2024)