After a lot of additional optimization of RobAid website where I have done a lot on both front- and back-end, I’ve decided to increase its usability and return some of its old features that made it look a bit more personal.

One of the features I plan implementing in my free time is a floating menu. As it has to do with CSS and JS, I’ve been thinking about backward compatibility and remembered I used to have problems with menu items I used to make 6 or 7 years ago, when there were way more Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) users.

If you didn’t know position: fixed  CSS property isn’t supported by IE6. The browser itself was released on August 27, 2001 and it had many following revisions and updates. 5 years later, Microsoft released IE7, and since then it came up with 3 more versions which are a bit selective about the operating system they are running on. In 2010 many webmasters, services and websites decided to drop support for IE6 (even Google dropped IE6 support in 2010) since the web changed a lot in past 10 years. I really can’t remember anymore when I switched to Firefox and later on fiddled with Chrome, but the time I am using IE is spent on comparability and potential layout problems websites I’m fixing tend to have.

While a design group created a page where they organized funeral for IE6, the folks from Microsoft created ie6countdown.com – a website about usage of IE6 across the world and why you shouldn’t use it any more.

Since I’m targeting tech savvy people as readers, i was surprised when I checked my statistics for the last year. Although the numbers of visitors using IE6 is dropping, there are users around the world that are still using this browser. Although I’m happy that there is roughly only 1.12% of my visitors who use this zombie browser, I decided to take the top 10 and their share in that 1.12% of overall visits.

Here’s the top 10 list of countries with visitors that are using a browser buried in 2010:

1.	India	19.99%
2.	China	17.65%
3.	United States	15.45%
4.	United Kingdom	6.03%
5.	Japan	5.93%
6.	South Korea	4.94%
7.	Iran	2.34%
8.	Canada	2.19%
9.	Taiwan	1.94%
10.	Australia	1.35%

So, I ask you to join the fight against zombie browsers and spread the word why should everyone switch to more modern browsers among your less tech savvy friends who might still be using them. In last 30 days I had the record low 73 visits from users using IE6, so I’m quite positive about implementation of new features without concern on significant user experience impact.

The only thing that bothered me, aside occasional unavailability of my websites (which were still running 99% of the time), is the problem with processor time. Although I optimized the websites manually and didn’t employ any plug-in to run heavy cron jobs on the server, I still had continuous warnings about my processor usage. After I contacted their very responsive tech support they said that  I don’t have to worry and my websites aren’t using their resources too much. However, from time to time I had a “friendly” neighbor or two which shared my hosting machine, and they’ve managed to make it pretty slow and unresponsive from time to time.

Unfortunately, due to larger processor usage, Bluehost doesn’t directly support compression and it is activated with some sort of script which calculates the need to turn it on. Alternatives are compressing through PHP or usage of Zlib compression and FastCGI instead usual PHP serving (which employs processor much more). I gave up serving compressed pages and used manual compression of static files which are served compressed if available (it will be explained in one of my future optimization posts).

In meantime,  my main website grew and it got much more traffic, aside its size. After a lot more optimization and bending rules to optimize website loading without any plug-in, the website loading became much better and there were the “neighbors”. In comparison, WordPress website running on W3 Total Cache is just a tad faster, but a lot less responsive on the user/visitor side and it’s killing the random features website offers… unless you are logged in.

One day the website became unavailable for a whole hour…  I checked with tech support and they told there was a software update. Afterward, a hardware update occurred and it lasted for hour and a half, and you can guess that it was followed by another software update. Overall, the website was unavailable for 6 hours that day. At first it got a bit faster and within few days it was slower than ever. That made me search for a VPS where I have all the features and guaranteed resources I need. XooNom.com is hosted on that VPS and I’m still tweaking it because it is an un-managed server.

So far, the website is much faster than it used to be. I didn’t move the larger website yet because I’m playing with the parameters and features.

The owner needed some changes regarding information, and after those changes I have done SEO and some website optimization.

Stay tuned

I kept a few of my sites that didn’t need CMS on m6 servers, but from time to time the sites went down. If you asked their tech support to update some of the very outdated cPanel features they would either answer with some totally unrelated “copy/paste” answer or didn’t reply at all (while marking the issue resolved). Not to mention other problems with dozen of replies without action or decent help (with a few people excluded, some were professional and accurate).

Their server is down for more than a day so I was forced to change the hosting of some sites. At least it gave a push for the daameer.com website redesign which will be started in April. Hope you’ll like new design and features.

The site will be a combination of a personal blog, portfolio and photo-gallery.

The rest of the site content will come when we finish all the features and design.