Happy eighth Birthday ImAFish! On this date in 2001 the first ImAFish site went live, a lot has changed since then including hundreds of blog posts, thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands of visitors!

Highlights over the past year include:

Five Essentials for Online News Sites
New Website 12 Stix Launches
My £683.78 Phone Bill!
Gordon Ramsay DONE Image Generator
My Top 10 Drupal Modules
How to Look Cool on Facebook
Why I Moderate Comments
iPhoto 09 (version 8) Review - Faces
My Top 6 Trance Podcasts
Clever, Burger King, Very Clever
My Top 10 Drupal Modules

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed and read ImAFish over the past eight years!

In 2003 we launched the low cost PHP/MYSQL web hosting specialist Switchweb, six years later we've decided to relaunch Switchweb with a fantastic new design, more low cost hosting and two amazing new services.

1. Online Advertising - Switchweb has a growing network of sites including ImAFish, iPod History and 12Stix, all are excellent choices for buying text link adverts. Getting higher Google ranking and page rank is increasingly important for websites which is why advertising through independent agents such as Switchweb is ever relevant.
2. Website Design - Switchweb has partnered with Shrewsbury based The Web Orchard to provide high quality web sites, content management systems and E-Commerce sites. The Web Orchard have a proven track record in delivering to customers such as Aston Martin, Honda, the YMCA and Unison.

Switchweb is the home to hundreds of websites and with its 99% up-time guarantee is the perfect choice for your website.

Packages start from just £13 per year with a domain name and provide reliable PHP/MYSQL web hosting. A full comparison of features and package.

For more visit www.switchweb.co.uk to see what we can do for your website!

In September I bought the Acer Aspire One, unfortunately being a cheapskate I chose the crippled SSD version and have regretted the slow write speeds ever since. At first I worked with the Linux Distro included however it was hard to upgrade and my 3G Dongle was poorly supported, then I opted for Windows XP however over the past couple of months I've grown frustrated with the slow loading and 'jelly mode' that the whole OS seems to enter when trying to write to the SSD.

I've tried various hacks including loading Firefox from a RAM disk but they only help so far. I was considering giving up and selling my Aspire One for the more powerful and sexier yet more expensive HP Mininote. This was until Ubuntu 9.04 was released.

It's well documented on the Ubuntu site that the Aspire One is well supported however it was my 3G dongle that concerned me. Ubuntu took about 30mins to install after using the Windows utility to write the image to my flash drive. 

Fortunately when plugging in my 3G adapter I was asked about my country and provider. It automatically added the interface to my network icon and I was able to connect quickly.

Ubuntu has breathed new life into my netbook and has made it useful again. It fits in nicely with my OS X and Windows Network and provides enough features at a good speed to give an improved experience.

I often read comments on Digg and Slashdot about the poor quality of some news site therefore I've come up with five golden rules for any news site:

1. Put the Entire Article on One Page

This must be one of the main gripes when it comes to reading articles on-line. It frustrates me, you start reading an article then for some reason it stops and you have to wait for the next page to load. There is no logical reason to it, almost everyone has scroll wheels and the concept of scrolling is well know with operating systems so why do news sites think they need to break up an article into two or more pages?

Rarely do I click past the first page of an article unless its really good, surely their site statistics tell a similar story for most users.

Good: BBC, Techcrunch

The BBC among others get this right providing the whole article on just one page

Bad: Reuters

Reuters do have a 'read as one page' link however if its only a two page article it is defunct anyway. It's sites like Reuters that make me sympathise with Adblock users.

2. Use Large Images

Good: Boston.com

Boston.com's big picture features are an amazing way to display images. Their recent Earth Hour article even allowed you to click on the images to see a before and after shot.

Bad: BBC

In a recent BBC survey one of the main points that came up was the size of the images within their articles so in their redesign the BBC added 20% to the size of the image. Unfortunately this is still 200% too small, I wouldn't mind if it was a thumbnail link or they made use of a lightbox like on the DailyMail website.

3. Don't use Slide shows for Images

This is mainly aimed at Forbes.com, their content is good but they display it in the worst way possible.

Good: Almost every site apart from Forbes.

Bad: Forbes

Its bad enough that they use a slide show in an inappropriate way but to make it auto run and the controls barely work is a total waste of what could be good content.

4. Provide External Links Within the Article

Good: Mashable, Techcrunch, Cnet News.com
Bad: BBC, Yahoo, ITN

The BBC waste precious sidebar content with an 'External Links' section, rather than reading the article and clicking on something that interests me I have to search the sidebar for a potential link.

5.Write about something on-line without Linking to it

Bad: BBC

A number of news site do this, especially when they are covering something slightly controversial. For instance the article talks about a video on YouTube yet fails to provide a link to it. Its like talking about an architecturally stunning building/landmark without providing a picture.

This article from the BBC about Two students who dressed up as the TV character Borat then put the video online is a prime example, the BBC talk about the video online yet fail to provide a link to it.