I’m currently Beta testing Google’s new Page Speed Service on my site.  It’s basically a transparent page content optimiser and CDN which aims to speed up delivery of sites to end users. This could be a huge deal for anyone who, like me, hosts their site from home.

Hosting a personal site from home is a great idea, and something I’d strongly recommend to anyone.  As well as learning the basics of server configuration and maintenance you also get several unique benfits, like:

• You can hook up other devices like weather stations, door bells or ambient Twitter clients
• Storage is virtually unlimited
• It’s pretty cheap to run (I reckon around £20 a year in electricity)

The one problem with hosting from home is bandwidth.  A basic DSL or Cable line is fine for handling modest everyday traffic (this site gets between 300 and 1,000 visits per day), but isn’t suited to handling large spikes.  Hopefully, Google’s Page Speed Service (PSS) will be able to smooth out those spikes and give me the best of both worlds.  So far it’s looking good. (more…)

I’ve just launched an early public beta of SocialSearchr.  Using a combination of Google AJAX Search and the newly released Google Custom Search the site aims to improve the quality of search results in various niche categories by including only results from specific, trusted sites. 

The first category to launch was recipe search, which only includes geniune, quality recipe sites such as the BBC Food site, Epicurious.com and others.  Other categories have followed, and each will be refined and improved over time using user feedback to hone results.

If you have any suggestions for new categories, please let me know.

Check it out here: http://www.socialsearchr.com/